Dave Anderson
Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer at Corteva
Thanks, Jim, and welcome everyone to the call.
Let's move to Slide eight for a detailed review of our operating EBITDA performance for the year -- or for the first half. You'll see that for the first half 2021, operating EBITDA grew $335 million versus the prior year, nearly $2.4 billion, a clear indication of how well we've executed in the first half and a reflection of our ability to capitalize on robust demand for our products. Driving the increased operating EBITDA were strong price and volume, with combined benefits of approximately $340 million. This came from focused commercial execution and penetration of new and differentiated products across all regions.
To illustrate this, sales of new Crop Protection products grew over $260 million versus the prior year. And at the same time, we delivered nearly 30% of organic seed growth in Latin America, driven by strong corn sales in Brazil. And finally, we continue to extract value for our yield-advantaged technology. And as Jim said, global corn pricing up 3% during the half. Costs were about a $60 million net headwind to operating EBITDA for the half.
This includes delivery of approximately $175 million from productivity initiatives, including the ongoing benefit from asset footprint rationalization and other cost improvements. This helped to partially offset $240 million of cost headwinds in the half, which are primarily market-driven. And we continue to operate in an environment marked with challenged supply chains and cost inflation.
In the first half, we experienced higher freight and logistics cost as global trade markets saw shipping demand outpace supply. Additionally, prices of certain active ingredients and intermediates continue to rise compared to the same period last year, including glyphosate. Now we continue to take action to mitigate these impacts where possible, including passing through certain inflationary costs for our seed and Crop Protection products and delivering against our productivity initiatives. As evidence of our disciplined focused execution, we delivered more than 190 basis points of margin expansion in the half. It's notable in terms of the agile operations team delivering strong performance.
Let's go now to Slide nine to cover a few highlights from the Crop Protection segment for the half, where organic sales grew 10%, which included a 4% headwind from the strategic decision to phase out certain low-margin products, primarily in insecticides. Again, strong demand for our new technology led to sales gains, including an increase of more than $260 million in new product sales when compared to the same period last year. Herbicides were up 13% compared to the first half of 2020, led by continued penetration of Arylex and Enlist. Fungicides grew 26%, driven by strong demand for Zorvec and Inatreq, primarily in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
And lastly, insecticides grew 3% in the half, which included a 16% negative impact from discontinued products. Growth was largely driven by our differentiated Spinosyns technology, including Jemvelva and Qalcova actives, which were up 14% in the half. Favorable product mix and strategic price increases drove pricing gains in all regions for the half, led by a 9% improvement in Latin America and a 3% price improvement in North America. Operating EBITDA for Crop Protection grew 26% from the prior year, driven by strong demand for new products and pricing execution. We did experience cost headwinds of approximately $130 million for this segment during the period.
Overall, the headwinds more than offset our productivity actions. In most cases, we see these higher costs representing a new baseline, which will continue to work to mitigate by taking pricing actions where possible and delivering ongoing productivity. Now despite these challenges, we drove over 220 basis points of operating EBITDA margin improvement in Crop Protection in the half. Very impressive performance.
Let's go to then Slide 10 and talk about the Seed highlights. You can see on Slide 10, organic sales for Seed were up 4%, driven by solid pricing, coupled with market share gains in Brazil safrinha, demand-driven earlier shipments for Brazil summer season and also volume growth in North America on increased planted area aligned with USDA estimates.
On pricing, we maintained our track record in extracting value for our yield-advantaged technology, with corn prices up 3% compared to prior year, led by double-digit price improvement in Latin America. Soybean volumes were up 7% for the half, led by an approximately 5% increase in U.S. planted area. Soybean pricing was down 2%, consistent with our expectations, as we continue to see competitive pressure in the U.S. market.
Other oilseeds were up 21% versus the first half of 2020, reflecting record sunflower volumes in Europe and also higher canola volumes in Canada. Operating EBITDA for this segment improved 13% on strong price execution globally, ongoing cost and productivity actions, lower royalties and bad debt and a favorable impact from currency. And while we experienced higher input costs, the teams continue to manage through these headwinds, and we're able to deliver operating EBITDA margin improvement of over 200 basis points for the segment for the half.
So now let's go to Slide 11 and talk about our full year 2021 guidance. You can see there that for the remainder of the year and our updated expectations for the full year, and with the backdrop of the strong performance for the first half, we're raising our reported net sales guidance to be in the range of $15.2 billion to $15.4 billion, representing 8% growth at the midpoint, which includes an approximately 2% tailwind from currency. We're also raising our operating EBITDA guide, and now expect to be in the range of $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion, representing 22% growth at the midpoint.
This increase reflects continued strong demand for our new products globally in both Crop Protection and Seed, coupled with strong price execution in key regions on technology and also improved currency. Specific to the second half, we expect price to largely offset cost headwinds, which are notably Seed-driven.
And as a result, volume, primarily in Latin America Crop Protection, is driving second half earnings growth. Now the volatility of exchange rates will continue to be a key variable we're watching, notably the Brazilian real, where we assumed a rate of 5.25 for the back half of the year. In Crop Protection, we anticipate $400 million of year-over-year improvement in sales from our new products, $100 million more than we originally estimated.
The additional growth is a testament to strong demand that we're seeing globally for our best-in-class technology. As we think about costs, the current inflationary environment is expected to continue through at least the end of the year. As a result, we now expect a net cost headwind of approximately $125 million for the full year 2021. This represents about $75 million in additional cost inflation from our previous estimate. It's driven by higher input costs as well as freight and logistics. Now we're actively monitoring supply chain pressures in the market, and the operational teams remain agile in meeting customer demand.
As it relates to SG&A, the organization continues to maintain disciplined spending. And we anticipate that as a percent of revenue, SG&A is expected to improve by approximately 50 basis points for the year despite higher commissions and also variable compensation. Taken together, it's an impressive improvement and impressive outlook and really highlights the strong focus by the full organization to execute on our strategy.
Let's go now to Slide 12 with a few comments on cash flow. I'll give you a view on our 2021 cash flow expectations. We now believe cash from operations will be in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion for the year. It reflects both increased earnings, but also the investment we're making in working capital to support growth. The organization continues to focus on cash cycle time. It's working.
As a result, we're targeting improvement in net working capital turns for the full year. We're increasing our capex spending target from $550 million to between $600 million and $650 million for 2021. The increase allows us to fund projects with high return on investment to support growth. And it follows a complete midyear review that we completed of all of our capital programs. We've experienced an improvement in the funded status of the U.S. pension plan year-to-date, driven by both asset returns and discount rate.
The improvement provides increased probability, there will be no required contributions to the plan in '21 or 2022. Finally, as Jim stated, we're committed to the return of cash to shareholders as evidenced by more than $1.2 billion we expect to return via dividends and share repurchases by the end of the year, which includes expected progress on the new $1.5 billion program that we recently announced.
Now if you move to Slide 13, I just want to give you some early insights on our planning process and thinking as we start to frame out 2022. Importantly, carrying forward our momentum from 2021, we expect to see organic growth globally. This will largely be driven by execution and further penetration of new and differentiated products across all regions, reflecting the strength of our portfolio and our pipeline, which are expected to drive increases in both volume and price in 2022.
For example, we continue to remain excited about the growth opportunities for Spinosyns, which we believe will approach sales of $1 billion in 2022. We expect Seed pricing to be additive to earnings when netted with the impact of higher cost of goods sold as a result of higher commodity costs.
And with our transition to Enlist, we expect royalty improvement for 2022 as part of our journey towards royalty neutrality by the end of the decade. Royalty reduction is anticipated to be more significant in '23 and '24, but next year will be an important next step on continuing net royalty improvement.
And lastly, we remain focused on delivering against productivity as input costs continue to evolve with the current market environment. So to manage this pressure, we're going to continue to drive execution on productivity initiatives, which are expected to partially offset any increase costs. And this is just our preliminary take on the setup for next year. We're going to share more details later this year. But certainly, we view 2022 as a solid opportunity for earnings and margin growth as we execute our strategy and we leverage our global footprint and our diversified portfolio.
So before turning it back to Jim, let me just do a quick summary, focus on both our 2021 delivery and the set-up for 2022. This year is characterized by first half operating EBITDA margin improvement of nearly 200 basis points and full year margin expectations also improved by approximately 200 basis points. And that setup for 2022 is positive. We're driving growth in all regions, across a strengthening portfolio and delivering solid operating leverage.
And with that, let me turn it back to Jim.
