Balancing aspirations with sustainability

While ensuring shareholders expectations of profitability, BERNAS has never undermined the importance of cultivating good corporate social responsibility practices. Despite the challenging environment in 2008, BERNAS continued to expand its corporate social responsibility programmes to ensure maximum reach to all communities.

Conducting business ethically through the lenses of our core values
We continue to promote healthy business ethics via our core values of being passionate and responsive, having integrity, trust and respect, creating value, continuous development, care and concern for the environment, developing entrepreneurial mindsets and creating a caring organisation. These core values permeate the Group, staff actions and underline every endeavour that we partake.

Enhancing employee relations and well-being
BERNAS continued to invest in employee relations and development of human resources through the many courses, workshops and training seminars to enhance soft-skills and new skills development.  More than RM160,000 was spent to promote job training, orientation and skills development, nationwide. BERNAS conducted motivational and tuition courses for 676 children sitting for the UPSR, PMR and SPM examinations in assisting children of staff to excel in public examinations. To further motivate the students to excel, prizes were also given to those who scored straight A’s in these examinations.

Reaching out to the community
Recognising the fact that our employees are our best goodwill ambassadors, in August 2008, BERNAS established its own employee volunteer programme with the participation of 70 employees, nationwide.  The programme kicked off with volunteers spending 90 hours at three orphanages and Tahfiz centres in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Alor Star, Kedah and Sungai Besar, Selangor.  The activities organised include building improvements and repairs, “gotong-royong”, taking the orphans out shopping for clothes and spending quality time with them by playing the roles of “mom” and “dad” for a day in each centre.  Donations in the form of rice, food items and household products were also given. 

The volunteers were also sent to provide rice supplies and relief efforts to the flood victims in Kedah, Perak, Pulau Pinang, Kelantan, Sabah and Sarawak.  A total of 2,000 MT of rice were promptly sent to the victims in these areas.

BERNAS also contributed rice provisions to orphanages, senior citizen homes, single mother associations and other charitable organisations. A total of 8,000 MT of rice were contributed to these organisations in 2008. The Umrah programme saw 100 farmers performing the Umrah in 2008 in appreciation of their dedication and loyalty to BERNAS.

We continued to support the popular GP Joran Competition by sponsoring rice for the competition winners. BERNAS has been a sponsor for GP Joran since 2000 and will continue to promote this popular recreational activity in Malaysia.

Reducing our carbon footprint
We are constantly reviewing our operations in tandem with promoting sustainable environmental practices to reduce our carbon footprint. In Malaysia, more than 350,000 MT of rice husks are produced annually as a result of paddy cultivation. These rice husks are traditionally burnt in the field or dumped in landfills.

BERNAS has discovered ways to reuse this waste material. To date, more than 22% of total ground husk is reused as animal feed.  In addition, the Kilang Beras BERNAS in Sungai Renggam, 100% of rice husk produced is used to generate electricity. Cyclonic husk furnaces have been introduced as diesel replacement energy for drying paddy in 27 of our mills thus creating a source for renewable energy. We hope to expand and introduce these green environmental practices across all our mills in the near future.

We will continue to explore new alternatives to reuse rice husks in new industries as a base element or ingredient such as fibre-reinforced concrete for the furniture industry. 

Promoting healthy living
In its research and development collaboration with Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), BERNAS will continue to promote rice as a healthy staple diet through continuous development and introduction of rice varieties of the highest nutritional value.

Beginning April 2009, BERNAS introduced the “Save More Community Store” – a retail initiative to provide consumers with a seamless supply of affordable, quality rice at all times.  This new initiative exemplifies our commitment to play our part in stabilising rice prices and supply while maintaining close ties with the community.