Sound governance and management are foundations for trust, transparency, and progress at our company. Our systems for ethical conduct, the way we engage with stakeholders, our approach to public policy, and our management of supply chain issues are all important elements of our sustainability strategy, cutting across our key pillars and contributing to overall value creation.
In recent years, we have significantly advanced our sustainability strategy and tied it more closely to our overall business strategy. We also have advanced how we manage sustainability across our company. In 2010, we formed two sustainability committees (one for our board of directors, the other for top executives across our company), created a position of chief sustainability officer, and developed a series of goals and performance targets that we are continuing to update and refine. While we had been focused on sustainability for a number of years, those latest steps took our program to a new level.
Smithfield does not currently tie executive pay to sustainability performance. However, we recognize the importance of senior-level involvement in sustainability programs and are exploring the possibility of establishing compensation-performance links.
In this section of our Web reporting, we discuss our governance and sustainability management structures, our ethical standards and programs, our sustainability targets, a recent enterprise risk management analysis, our supply chain management, our stakeholder engagement efforts, public policy issues of interest to our company, and our political contributions. This section also discusses the results of an updated materiality analysis we conducted in preparation for this year’s report to help us better understand—and better report on—the issues that are of greatest importance to our company and to our stakeholders.
