Achieving our goal to sustainably source ingredients globally requires market transformation. First and foremost, we partner with our bottling partners and suppliers in order to actively stay on our continual improvement path. Our industry and nonprofit partnerships play a crucial role in achieving the changes we seek across the globe. We work with many organizations, including Conservation International, The Consumer Goods Forum, SAI Platform, Solidaridad, The Sustainability Consortium, USAID, World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture and WWF.

In 2014, Coca-Cola launched major initiatives with two leading suppliers as part of the new supply chain program Field to Market®: The Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. By the end of 2015, we aim to engage farmers collectively representing 250,000 acres and, by 2020, to extend that reach to 1 million acres—equating to roughly 50 percent of our global corn supply.

We also joined the Food Resilience Program of the White House’s Climate Data Initiative. Our chief technical and innovation officer represented The Coca-Cola Company at the kickoff executive roundtable, held in Washington, D.C., in July 2014. The initiative focuses on cutting carbon pollution in the United States while helping communities prepare for challenges resulting from climate change impacts. The initiative’s Food Resilience Program aims to make America’s agricultural sector and the global food system more adaptable and resilient.

Our sustainable agriculture project in China continued to progress in 2014 with our work in Songyuan, in the Jilin province. With partners WWF and Cargill, the goals of this project are to help local farmers increase corn yields, reduce post-harvest waste and reduce their environmental footprints. Following the implementation of 10 demonstration corn farms in its first year, 20 additional farms throughout the province were brought on board in 2014, and our training programs were made available to many more farmers throughout the province, engaging more than 12,000 producers. Our work in China is a good example of how we are addressing increased supply chain sustainability at the farm level.