Our Ethics & Code of Conduct

Aiming for responsible growth

ABOUT OUR ETHICS POLICY

Our Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct serve as a framework for the fundamental principles and commitments the Group wants all its employees to uphold, regardless of their entity, function, or geographic location.

Code of Conduct

In 2013, our top management initiated a framework for business ethics at Limagrain as part of our Corporate Social Reponsibility (CSR) program.

At Limagrain, business ethics encompasses both the conduct of individual employees and the company’s behavior as a whole. The spectrum of ethics considerations is extremely wide and varied—from fighting corruption and protecting the environment, to ensuring employee health and product safety.

Limagrain has had an official Code of Conduct since 2015. It allows our employees to speak a shared language and adhere to consistent governance and ethical principles across the entire Group.

Every employee around the world should be aware of our Code of Conduct, its purpose and content, and be able to apply it when necessary.

Respecting Human Rights

Our Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct are aligned with the following international texts, whose principles the Group shares:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
The key conventions of the International Labour Organization, especially those addressing child labor and forced labor (conventions 29, 105, 138, and 182), as well as those related to worker health and safety (155), discrimination (111), equal pay (100), and freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively (87 and 98),
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,
The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises,
The French legal transposition of the European Directive of 22/10/2014 on the reporting of non-financial information.

In addition, Limagrain has been a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact since December 2013. It pledges to champion and uphold Human Rights principles within its teams, across the entire Group and its sphere of influence, and to ensure that it is not made complicit in their violation.

Respecting the Rights of the Child

At Limagrain, we are aware that child labor exists in certain parts of the world. This is unacceptable. We collaborate with local stakeholders (authorities, NGOs, etc.) and work tirelessly to eradicate child labor. Ever since we established a Limagrain subsidiary in India, we have made combatting child labor by our sub-contractors a priority. Although child labor is explicitly forbidden in our Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct, every day we take additional measures to further enforce this rule.

Since 2012, when it began its vegetable seed activities, HM. CLAUSE India has implemented a host of measures as part of its continuous improvement policy. As part of its CSR program, our subsidiary has rolled out its own comprehensive procedure to eradicate child labor in India. This initiative, known as the Child Labor Awareness Program (CLAP), focuses on several key pillars.

We guarantee that no children work at any Limagrain sites across all our activities. No children work in our facilities in India.

We monitor our contract farmers rigorously with regular controls through three key measures:

A contractual ban on child labor.

Awareness raising and audits: Over the past two years, all the farmers we monitor directly have received awareness raising training on this issue. Our Social Program Managers and 27 Production Supervisors also audit them routinely. Furthermore, an external auditor collaborates with our local teams to perform additional audits for closer monitoring.