Could you give us an overview of Syngenta’s presence and business structure in Asia?

Under the umbrella of Syngenta Group, there are three entities operative in Asia Pacific (excluding China): Syngenta Crop Protection (CP), Syngenta Seeds, and ADAMA, which is our generic crop protection input company. The Chinese market is managed by Syngenta Group China. Singapore became the regional HQ for APAC about 20 years ago and it is home to one of many production plants in APAC, as well as our R&D facilities, including our formulation development lab and our Seedcare Institute.

Could you give us a sense of the company’s performance in the past year and the factors underpinning its performance?

2021 was a tremendous year, with our Group sales growing by 23%. Out of the US$28.2 billion in sales, about US$13.5 billion was represented by our Crop Protection business. Our strong performance is a combination of the resilience built over the years in terms of supply routes and in-country capabilities together with a mix of advantageous market dynamics, and the pandemic having pushed a lot of attention to agriculture as governments worked to prevent the health crisis from turning into a food crisis. Favorable commodity prices came in support of farmers who have shown more openness to new technologies. The threats of climate change, including extreme weather events, sent a powerful signal that accelerated the adoption of risk-mitigating technologies. Another outcome of the pandemic has been the reliability of supply chains enabled by Syngenta’s capability and scale.

What do you identify as the key issues threatening global food supply chains today?

What we see today - including climate change and the pandemic - form an almost perfect storm that is becoming even worse with the crisis in Ukraine, inflationary pressures, and the lockdowns in China. Permeating through all these issues is climate change: Between 2018 and 2021, Thailand saw the biggest droughts in its living memory. Two years ago, Australia faced similar conditions. Weather instability wreaks havoc on farmers who cannot grow crops consistently. The conflict in Ukraine has also reduced a significant amount of sunflower and wheat. At the same time, fertilizer supply is also squeezed, since Russia is a big producer. We are going to see higher inflation further stressing food markets.

How is digitalization relevant for Asian farmers?

The Asian Pacific market is fragmented, made of about 300-400 million farmers each with one hectare (ha) or less of landholding, with the exception of Australia where landholdings are much larger. For smallholders, a 1% increase in their yields makes little difference, so what we are looking at is how to create scale in a fragmented environment without changing ownership. At the same time, many farmers are digitally connected today, usually through the youth in the family, and the penetration of mobile phones in Asia Pacific is growing, including in rural areas. As farmers get access to smartphones, they will be connected digitally to a more global community. Syngenta’s technologies in Asia are about enabling access to knowledge, to services, and also to markets, in a consolidated manner. We would like to enable the farming ecosystem for the benefit of the farmer, in partnerships and other collaborative efforts.

Syngenta committed to investing US$2 billion in sustainable agriculture breakthroughs by 2025. What are your main focuses?

Although little spoken about, agriculture, including forestry and other land use, contributes 23% of GHG emissions globally. Sustainable agriculture is absolutely critical, and our products play a key role in it. For instance, we offer a system used in no-till farming – no-tillage is a conservation technique to increase the soil health by leaving a part of the previous year’s crop remnant on the surface before planting; in this way, the soil is not disturbed. Syngenta is also bringing to the market more sustainable products such as biostimulants and biocontrols to augment the traditional crop protection inputs used to control diseases and pests. Sustainable agriculture should be the standard way of doing agriculture, but this is obviously difficult for low-income farmers; therefore, sustainable agriculture should also be the most profitable way of doing agriculture. To make that happen, we must connect farmers with the customer that is willing to pay more for the sustainable way that something is grown.

Do you have a final message?

Farmers are probably the least served and underappreciated part of the society in APAC, so it is incumbent on all of us to do things right, put them first, and help to solve their problems, in a collaborative manner.