Dave Anderson
Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer at Corteva
Thanks, Chuck. In behalf of the Corteva team, I'm going to say we're all very excited to have Chuck join us at this time. It's a terrific position for the company, and we've got tremendous value that we can deliver. I want to welcome everybody also to the call. Let's start on slide five, which shows our financial results for the quarter and also year-to-date. Starting on the left side of the chart, you can see it was another solid three months of continued growth and margin improvement.
Compared to the prior year, we delivered 24% organic growth, gains in both seed and crop protection, led by Latin America and North America. In the quarter, we saw accelerated demand from customers, particularly in Latin America, which translated into an estimated $100 million in sales in the quarter that was previously forecasted in the fourth quarter. Looking at earnings, we delivered seasonal loss of $51 million of operating EBITDA in the quarter, which is an improvement of greater than $120 million compared to the prior year.
Turning to the year-to-date results. Organic sales were up 9% to just over $12 billion. The growth was led by continued demand for new products, driving more than $330 million in growth from new crop protection products. Seed sales improved on increased planted area in U.S. soybeans and also strong demand for corn in Latin America. EBITDA of $2.31 billion year-to-date, up 25% compared to the same period last year. And year-to-date pricing coupled with volume gains more than offset cost headwinds, driving nearly 220 basis points of margin improvement compared to prior year.
And this is particularly impressive given the challenges we're seeing in global supply chains and the cost inflation we continue to face. And we believe it's a clear differentiator for Corteva. Let's go then to slide six with more detail on our global sales growth. Here, you can see the balance and diversity of the global business in the results. In North America, organic sales were up 5% through the first three quarters. Seed sales benefited from increased planted area for both corn and soybeans as well as the continued penetration of Enlist E3 soybeans.
Consistent with last quarter, Enlist E3 represents about 35% of the U.S. soybean market in 2021. Feedback from growers and performance to this point is quite positive. Corn price was up 2% while soybean prices were down 3% as we continue to see competitive pressure in that market. North America Crop Protection delivered year-to-date organic sales of 10%. Demand for new technologies, including Enlist, herbicide double digits. Price increased 3% through the third quarter on price execution in response to rising input costs, including raw materials, freight and logistics.
In Europe, Middle East and Africa, we had strong organic sales growth of 7%, resulting from price execution and record sunflower seed volumes. This growth was muted by an approximate $80 million to $100 million sales impact from corn supply shortages in '21. In Crop Protection, the portfolio of new and differentiated products remain in high demand, including technologies, such as Arylex herbicide and Zorvec fungicide, which enabled us to drive price, volume and gain market share in Europe despite the impact of discontinued products.
In Latin America, we realized 27% organic sales growth on strong volumes and price gains, driven by execution on our price for value strategy, coupled with increases to offset rising input costs. In Seed, volumes grew 16%, driven by market share gains in Brazil safrinha and earlier shipments for the Brazil summer season. In Crop Protection, volumes grew 18% on significant demand for new and differentiated technologies, such as Isoclast and Jemvelva insecticides.
In Asia Pacific, we delivered 7% organic sales growth compared to prior year with both volume and pricing gains. Seed volumes were down largely due to COVID-related demand impacts, particularly in Southeast Asia and India. Crop Protection organic growth of 11% was led by continued demand for new products, including Rinskor herbicide and also Pyraxalt insecticide. Let's move now to slide seven for a detailed review of our operating EBITDA performance through the third quarter. Through the first nine months, operating EBITDA grew more than $460 million to approximately $2.3 billion.
This was driven by strong organic growth with combined price and volume benefits of more than $600 million as we continue to benefit from new and differentiated products against a strong market backdrop. We recognized pricing gains in both segments in all regions during the period. Global corn price was up 4% year-to-date, demonstrating the value that we bring to customers.
Sales of new Crop Protection products grew more than $330 million versus the prior year and price increased 4% for the segment, which helped offset higher raw material and logistics costs. With respect to increased costs, we recognized roughly $350 million of market-driven cost headwinds year-to-date as well as $70 million of increased compensation costs and investment spend to support growth. This was partially offset by approximately $200 million in productivity initiatives, resulting in a net cost headwind of $220 million through the first three quarters.
Very importantly, disciplined execution while managing through complex supply chain dynamics translated into more than 200 basis points improvement in operating EBITDA margin through the first nine months of the year, again, a clear differentiator. Let's go now to slide eight where I'd like to discuss the current state of the global supply chain. Like other companies and, obviously, various industries, we continue to face supply chain challenges and cost inflation and to reiterate the theme we discussed at the end of the second quarter, we believe these challenges will continue through 2022.
We've seen the cost of some of our key raw materials and co-formulates increased more than 20% in the past year, driving expected overall cost inflation to low to mid-single digits as a percent of our cost of sales. In addition to longer shipping times, we've also experienced additional downtime from supply constraints, in part due to the more than 60 force majeures declared directly from suppliers or indirectly from other raw material suppliers.
Now to help offset the impact of inflated input costs, we're utilizing operational levers, such as pricing and very focused productivity initiatives. As an example, on October 1, we announced on average mid-single-digit price increases in the U.S. on the majority of our Crop Protection products. This includes externally sourced glyphosate, where we expect our pricing will be up approximately $90 million for the full year. Now just for context, glyphosate sales represent less than 5% of our total annual Crop Protection Sales, but the inflation impact has been significant.
With this backdrop, it's impressive that we're achieving attractive performance measured by on-time delivery to customer requests. The agility and flexibility that our teams are demonstrating has enabled us to capitalize on evolving market conditions, including increased demand for both Seed and Crop Protection products. With that, let's go to slide nine. I'd like to provide the update on our full year 2021 outlook. We're raising our full year revenue guidance. We now expect reported net sales in the range of $15.5 billion to $15.7 billion, up 10% at the midpoint over 2020.
We feel confident in this growth based on strong market fundamentals, continued demand for new and differentiated products globally in both Crop Protection and Seed segments and price execution in all regions, coupled with pricing for higher input costs. Mostly as a result of market-driven factors mentioned earlier, we're raising our estimate for full year costs by $100 million for the year, predominantly in Crop Protection. We're now expecting a total increase of $475 million versus prior year.
In addition to these headwinds, we also expect increased SG&A and R&D costs of about $50 million, which includes spend for increased compensation as well as investment spend to support growth. Importantly, we're reaffirming and affirming the full year expectation to deliver operating EBITDA in the range of $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion for the year, an improvement of 22% over 2020 at the midpoint. This translates to approximately 150 basis points of margin expansion for the full year.
And lastly, we're now forecasting a base tax rate in the range of 18% to 20%, coupled with a lower average share price count due to our share repurchase activity. We have increased our operating EPS guidance to a range of $2.05 to $2.15 per share for the year. Let's now let's go to slide 10 and focus on 2022. As you can see on slide 10, we've given you our initial planning framework. And you recall that we shared this with you last quarter. It's intended as a reminder of the key assumptions as we frame out the '22 plan, including organic revenue growth, Seed pricing versus commodity costs, strong penetration of new products, royalty cost improvement and continued cost inflation, partially offset by productivity initiatives.
Importantly, this is all with a backdrop of continued strong market outlook and solid grower economics, which will drive customer demand in 2022. Turning to slide 11, aligning with our midterm EBITDA target range for 2022. On the left of slide 11, we've shown you at a high level, the bridge from our 2021 operating EBITDA guide to the EBITDA range implied by our midterm targets. Now let's go to the right side and cover a few of these key points.
Market fundamentals remain positive, and our early views are that U.S. corn and soy acres will be approximately 180 million in total with a slight shift to soy based on relative economics at this time. Outside of the U.S., market growth looks strong in markets like Brazil where planted area is expected to increase 4% to 5%. In terms of organic growth, we expect that the global seed portfolio will continue to deliver on our price for value strategy where we expect 2022 pricing to be in excess of estimated seed cost headwinds from higher commodity prices.
Crop Protection new and differentiated products, including Arylex and Enlist herbicides and Isoclast insecticide will be a primary driver in delivering above market in that segment. Turning to our early assumptions on costs. We've increased our estimate of Seed commodity price impacts and expect to see Seed cost increases in the range of $250 million to $300 million, largely driven by North America and Latin America. As I mentioned earlier, we expect Seed pricing to outpace these costs in 2022. In Crop Protection, market-driven inflation will continue through 2022. And we expect cost headwinds of at least $150 million.
This includes the impact of the sell-through of inventory and continued cost inflation as a result of the supply chain conditions we've already discussed. It's too early to comment on when we think costs will level off. However, we will be using operational levers, such as pricing and productivity initiatives, to mitigate cost headwinds. This provides additional transparency into our preliminary planning for '22 and how that bridges to our midterm target EBITDA range.
Put simply, price and volume will be critical to earnings and margin growth against the backdrop of strong customer demand and also continued cost and supply chain challenges. We will be providing more specifics during our fourth quarter earnings call in early February and communicating the full '22 guidance at that time.
And with that, I'll now turn the call back over to Jeff.
