Production and Supply Operations As part of the new strategy, we have been  building an efficient, integrated Production  and Supply (P&S) organization uniting global  operational excellence from Crop Protection  and grower insight and agronomic capabilities  from Seeds.  In 2011, P&S made good progress in the  development of an integrated organization,  while driving further efficiencies and meeting  the strong growth in demand for our products. P&S has also benefited greatly from the  Learning & Exchange Accelerating Progress  (LEAP) knowledge sharing initiative launched  in 2009. In the past year LEAP has helped the  integration of P&S across the chemical and  seeds areas of our business through a wide  range of awareness and education modules  designed to support rapid knowledge transfer  and learning.  LEAP helped Syngenta earn recognition as  one of Europe’s Most Admired Knowledge  Enterprises in the 2011 MAKE Awards. These  are the world’s longest running benchmarks  for identifying organizations that deploy their  knowledge effectively to outperform their peers. Global Procurement had a productive year,  working in partnership with a number of key  suppliers. Our chemicals operations have  15 core strategic supplier partnerships and  a further 70 important partnerships. Our  collaboration with these partners includes  helping them maintain continuous improvement  in quality, productivity and health, safety and  environment (HSE) performance in line with our  internal standards. We have similar HSE and  quality partnerships with the contract farmers  who are responsible for our seeds production.  In a number of countries, we work with the Fair  Labor Association to help ensure that our  suppliers meet acceptable standards, particularly  on child labor. The program now spans three  regions and more than 16,800 suppliers. All eight active ingredient manufacturing plants  ran at or near capacity in 2011 in response to  market growth. Our engineering team is currently  engaged in many other projects to further  enhance or expand production facilities and,  in collaboration with R&D, we are preparing  for the launch of around 50 new formulations. A more integrated approach is helping us to  increase our own productivity, just as it does  for our customers. For example, leveraging  our crop protection expertise enabled our  Argentinean seeds operation to set a new  site record for corn shipments. We further increased seed production capacity  in 2011, including investments in new corn seed  processing plants in the Philippines, Indonesia,  China and Hungary. We also expanded corn  capacity in Latin America at three of our existing  plants. In Brazil, PLENE ®  sugar cane production  began in April at our new purpose-built facility. Expanding production capacity Integrating the P&S organization Purpose-built facility for  PLENE ®  production in  Itápolis, Brazil. 36 Syngenta Annual Review 2011