Guilherme Cauduro is Executive Director for the Bureau Veritas’ AFC Division in Brazil. AFC stands for Agriculture, Food and Commodities and is one of the company’s five divisions in Brazil.
Bureau Veritas is a French company specialised in testing, inspection and certification founded in Belgium in 1828. Five years later, the headquarters moved to Paris, where it is now publicly quoted on the Euronext exchange. Bureau Veritas has 82,000 employees in 140 countries with a network of over 1,600 offices and laboratories. It operates in various sectors, including building and infrastructure, agri-food, and commodities, marine and offshore, industry, certification, and consumer products.
We have a massive operation inland. When trading houses originate soybeans or corn from farmers, they send the trucks to the farms to load and transport the commodities to the ports or the crushing plant. They hire our services to inspect the trucks when they load to ensure the quality is according to the contract between the farmer and the trading house.
Another business we do upstream is credit monitoring. The trading houses, banks, and chemical companies prefinance the farmers and cooperatives who need money to plant and harvest. We are on the farms to check how the crops are growing and to see if the harvest will be good enough to pay back the money to the financier.
Bureau Veritas is also prominent in cotton, particularly in Mato Grosso State, where we test about half of Brazil´s cotton production. We have five laboratories in Brazil that test cotton fibre quality.
We are very much involved in farm transhipment. When the trading houses tranship cargoes from trucks to rail cars or trucks to barges, we are in the transhipment points collecting samples from trucks, from the barge, and from the rail cars to see if the quality is OK.
We also work for seed companies, protecting their royalties from GM crops. In Brazil, seed companies can charge royalties against GM crops for ten years, and we have teams that inspect the crops to ensure farmers pay royalties.