COFCO Outpaces ABCD Traders With Only Validated Scope 3 Target

COFCO International cut land-related emissions from soy production by 11 percent and from corn by 23 percent in 2025 — making China's state-owned trading giant the only member of the big five agricultural traders with a Scope 3 target validated under the SBTi's stricter 2022 rules. Meanwhile, none of its ABCD rivals — ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus — has shown unambiguous emission reductions, and two have quietly abandoned SBTi-validated commitments.

That's the headline finding from the latest installment of the "Chasing Net Zero" assessment series, which tracks corporate progress against 2030 climate goals. For soft-commodity practitioners, the story matters because COFCO has done something structural: it tied $1.2 billion in loans to hitting its SBTi goals for soy and corn. Lenders offered discounted rates — measured in basis points, the company says — in exchange for delivery.

"I think they're really an outlier," said Leah Samberg, a lead scientist at the nonprofit Accountability Framework initiative, who has assessed the strategies of the major agribusinesses. "They're definitely pretty out in front on this."

How big is the decarbonization problem?

The scale is dizzying. A single large agribusiness might trade 100 million metric tons of commodities per year — enough to fill roughly 4 million shipping containers.

The biggest lever is ending conversion of undeveloped ecosystems to farmland. Deforestation alone emitted 2.8 billion metric tons of CO2e in 2023, before counting grassland conversion. Sourcing is tangled: Bunge, for example, used satellite data in 2025 to monitor deforestation across more than 100,000 farms spanning 220,000 square miles in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Those efforts have slowed but not stopped land conversion, according to nonprofits tracking the sector.

Rulebook gaps compounded the problem. The SBTi didn't require deforestation accounting until 2022; the Greenhouse Gas Protocol only resolved remaining land-sector questions earlier this year.

Where do the incumbents stand?

• ADM kept its 2022 pledge to cut Scope 3 by 25 percent by 2030 but dropped plans for SBTi validation. Its footprint has shrunk just 2 percent since 2021.
• Louis Dreyfus has seen its footprint grow 6 percent since its 2022 baseline.
• Bunge appears on track for its SBTi-validated goal, but its footprint nearly doubled in 2025 following a merger; the company declined to provide details.
• Cargill reported 235 million tCO2e in 2024, up 40 percent since 2017 — the group's largest footprint until the Bunge merger — and told reporters it is no longer working toward its validated Scope 3 goal. Its new target, a 25 percent absolute Scope 3 cut between 2020 and 2035, is too slow to qualify: SBTi rules would require roughly 60 percent over the same period, said Greg Downing, senior director for sustainability at Cargill.

Downing pointed to hard-to-abate sources such as fertilizer. Nitrous oxide release is hard to eliminate. "There just aren't the technologies yet to reduce the volume that ends up as nitrous oxide emissions," he said.

Why is COFCO moving faster?

COFCO reached parity with the ABCD group roughly a decade ago after acquiring traders in the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Its 2024 validation — still the group's only one — requires conversion-linked emissions in targets plus separate deforestation goals. It pledges a 46 percent cut in land-related emissions per ton of soy between 2021 and 2033, with a similar corn target. Soy sits somewhat behind schedule; corn runs ahead.

The deeper driver may be Beijing. A 2020 drought in Rio Grande do Sul nearly halved soy output in one of Brazil's top exporting states, sharpening food-security concerns around a country — Brazil — that now supplies a third of China's agricultural imports. A Systemiq consultation paper earlier this year described China applying its solar-and-EVs playbook to food: long-term, top-down vision backed by policy and finance, alongside support for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

"China is the only significant player in the system that is thinking in a more long-term way about the shape of their agriculture system," said Christine Delivanis, managing partner at Systemiq.

China already holds over 80 percent of global solar PV and lithium-ion battery manufacturing, supplied 60 percent of EVs sold worldwide, and fields the six largest wind turbine makers — dominance that pushed the U.S. to impose 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs. Sustainable agriculture demands different skills: motivating thousands of small producers rather than iterating factory processes, requiring traceability and farm-level data.

"The companies that will be more prepared, with stronger foundations for looking at sustainability in the long term, are the companies that will be ready to act on the new circumstances that we'll be seeing in the future," said André Vasconcelos of supply-chain-mapping nonprofit Trase.

The milestone to watch: whether COFCO closes the soy gap before 2033 — and whether any ABCD trader re-enters SBTi validation.