AGRICULTURAL giant Cargill is a force to be reckoned with in the bulk freight trades.

The world’s biggest agricultural commodities trader — headquartered in Geneva, with 10 offices worldwide — paid its billionaire owners almost $1.5bn in its most recent financial year.

It has about 640 time-chartered vessels on the water on an average day, and moves tens of millions of tonnes of grain, iron ore, coal and fertiliser around the world each year.

Under Jan Dieleman, its head of ocean transportation, it has also become a rare example of a major charterer, prepared to experiment and put real money into greener shipping.

This has included experimenting with wind power, methanol and biofuels, as well as all manner of digital tools meant to help just-in-time arrivals.

“We’re doing a lot — and we’re sharing a lot,” Dieleman said.

“We’re trying to keep on having that ambition of making progress, but also doing it in a way that’s actually real.

“We want to be known for the things we do, not the things we promise.”

Dieleman is well established as among the top industry bosses pushing the green agenda. But he has also warned repeatedly that without regulation there is only so much that companies — even first-movers — can do.

The failure of the International Maritime Organization to adopt the Net-Zero Framework in October 2025 was a big setback, particularly for the Global Maritime Forum, of which Dieleman is chair.

But he left 2025’s GMF in Antwerp feeling more positive than he did going in, saying the green agenda is not going away.

While a “Yes” vote from the IMO would have added clarity (wind power would have become a “slam dunk”), the NZF still came with questions over the design of lifecycle assessment guidelines for green fuels, which made its effectiveness hard to predict.

Dieleman also shares concerns about how the IMO would spend the funds raised by a global carbon price.

“I get nervous when an IMO body needs to pick which projects they’re going to finance in which countries,” he said.

Problems like how to classify and regulate liquefied natural gas’s climate impact were probably fixable, but any smell of corruption in the Net-Zero Fund would be a far bigger political risk to the green cause.

“That fund, if you don’t do that well… then you have a risk of this whole thing blowing up,” Dieleman said.

The NZF, in its current form, has little chance of passing, given the opposition stacked against it. But Dieleman reckons an amended form — with more clarity on lifecycle assessments and fund governance — could get through in 2026.

Cargill entered a strategic deal in September with Costamare Bulkers Holdings, which saw it buy a large chunk of Costamare’s trading book of chartered-in vessels.

The trading giant also launched a bunkering joint venture, Seascale Energy, with product tanker operator Hafnia. It hopes the scale (some 8m tonnes of bunkers at launch) will help it tackle persistent problems of quality, transparency and efficiency in the marine fuels market.

Dieleman said the shadow fleet* and seafarer wellbeing were among his biggest concerns heading into 2026.

He praised Greek shipowner Evangelos Marinakis’ recent suggestion for a kind of short-term amnesty from US and European authorities to allow the scrapping of elderly, sanctioned vessels.

“I thought that was actually a very pragmatic and interesting approach to an issue that nobody really wants to touch,” Dieleman said.

“We have ships that shouldn’t be on the water, but the problem is you can’t get them off the water.”

Dieleman said the industry also had to tackle the “exponential” growth of mental health problems among seafarers, pointing to reports of higher suicide rates at sea than in other industries.

“We should be doing better than that,” Dieleman said. “We can’t just take that and say: ‘Well, that’s the way it is’.”

Dieleman also appeared in the Top 100 in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.