Alejandra Vazquez Langle, Vice President of Global Sustainability at Grupo Bimbo is speaking at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in Mexico City on 'Transitioning to Regenerative Agriculture in Mexico: Corporate and Government Programs Supporting Small Growers to Adopt Climate-Smart Practices' on October 29 at 11.50am CDMX. Ahead of the summit this month, Alejandra highlights the need for the Mexican agricultural industry to transition over to regenerative agriculture and support farmers with climate-smart solutions. Watch the 8 minute interview or read the full transcript below.

How is Grupo Bimbo collaborating with supply chain partners to implement regenerative agriculture programs?

[Alejandra Vazquez Langle]: We have a sustainability strategy that we defined at the end of 2020, where we looked at ambitious goals across three main topics. The first one is Baked For You, which is about the nutritional content in our products. The second one is more about the social part that we call  Baked For Life, and it looks at the way we empower the communities and where we have operations across the value chain. The third one is Baked For Nature where we want to be a sustainable by design company working in regenerative practices. We explore wastewater, but also cover net zero carbon emissions, which are our goals in this field. We have a specific initiative focused on regenerative agriculture. We encapsulate all the actions that we are doing in terms of agriculture, and we define goals to ensure that all our key ingredients come from practices made from regenerative agriculture. As we are a bread and snacks company, one key element for us working in crops is collaborating with agricultural farmers. In Mexico, we are working with CIMMYT and the International Center of Corn and the WIC to develop several conservation practices. This practice has been developed to be our framework in regenerative agriculture. So, working with CIMMYT, that's an ally in all of these, and working with experts and farmers across Mexican crops, we define this framework of what we now call regenerative agriculture. We're working together to improve, implement and define these activities, and to move all our key ingredients to this kind of practice. Before, we work with CIMMYT to define what we call regulatory agriculture, and how it's included in our sustainability strategy and that it's nourishing a better world as part of our business purpose. And with all of this, we define the way we are going to reach and work together with farmers, different learning institutes and different allies to reach these goals.

Could you tell us about the key achievements of Grupo Bimbo's regenerative agriculture projects, and how they have contributed to the social wellbeing of the communities in which they have taken place?

[Alejandra Vazquez Langle]: Most of the projects that we have been working on have been in North America. We have projects in Canada, USA, and in Mexico. We have allies like CIMMYT in Mexico and North America, and also different suppliers. We work through the suppliers to reach the farmers and work with them to develop best practices. In Mexico, we work through CIMMYT to reach the farmers and develop regenerative practices with them. So, one of the things that we are doing in this kind of project is teaching and working with farmers to understand the benefits and best use of practice. As you know, we have been working on regenerative agriculture practices for a lot of years and working with other countries is the difficult part. You need to convince everybody to try and demonstrate the benefits of doing all these practices and include specialist KPIs in our framework. One of the things that we are looking for is soil health and water reduction. We are looking to reduce the use of chemicals and improve the community and promote a hypothesis of all these initiatives. We are also trying to promote the use of these practices and demonstrate with these hypotheses that they will have a benefit in soil health. That means that they will have soil for a lot of crops. We are also looking to evaluate if they are going to have the other benefits measuring these KPIs.

At World Agri-Tech Mexico City, you will join the panel on ‘Transitioning to Regenerative Agriculture in Mexico: Corporate and Government Programs Supporting Small Growers to Adopt Climate-Smart Practices.’ What are you most looking forward to talking about on this session?

[Alejandra Vazquez Langle]: This event is super important because we need to share common objectives across different parts of the country. It’s also important that we talk about synergies and the way we can do more together. We can do a lot of initiatives as a company, but there's going to be a small initiative, only in the size of the company that want to do this. But if we work together with the government, different institutes like CIMMYT and with different companies, we can have better results. So, the synergies and working together to encourage the use of these practices is going to be a part of what I'm going to discuss on the panel. For me, teamwork and all the things that we can do together has to be the key element for everybody to have a better environment.