On September 10, the International BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, together with the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance (CIDEG) at Tsinghua University, will host an international academic workshop “Competition in Global Grain Value Chains” in Beijing.
This expert workshop will address the changing nature of the global grain trade and its transition from linear value chains to sophisticated ecosystems, and the role of competition policy in analyzing this transition. The workshop will take place against the background of the first-ever joint sector inquiry of the BRICS competition authorities into the global grain trade launched in 2026.
The global grain trade is the backbone of global food security and an essential node in the global food value chains. However, the global traders’ — the ABCD+ group (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, LDC, and smaller satellite traders) — orchestrating power over the global value chain may harm food security at multiple levels. The mechanism of this orchestrating power has been described in the BRICS Centre’s recent report “From Fields to Futures: Competition, Financialization and Digitalization in Global Grain Value Chains”, which calls for a wider discussion of and, potentially, a decisive action against the growing concentration of power of the ABCD+ traders.
The workshop discussion will focus on the growing complexity of the global food system – and grain trade as one of its integral parts – from different perspectives coming from economics, competition policy, political economy, and governance. Financialization, deep digitalization, and proliferation of “coopetition” as a business strategy serve as examples of potential intervention points that will structure the discussion during the workshop.
The discussion will proceed in a two-part panel blending perspectives from competition authorities, academics, and the business community.
Among the speakers:
- Chen Ling, Professor, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Director, CIDEG
- Cui Zhiyuan, Professor, Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University
- Jia Kai, Vice Dean, School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Alexey Ivanov, Director, BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, Professor, HSE Law School
- Anastasia Nesvetailova, Director, Macroeconomic and Development Policies Branch, GDS, UNCTAD
- Mohammed El-Beltagy, CEO, Optomatica
- Wang Dongbin, Research Program Director, China Institute, Fudan University
- Xu Poling, Director, Office of Russian Economic Studies, Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
- Ruslan Dzhaliukov, Deputy Head, FAS Russia (online)
- Dmitry Klishin, Representative of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation in the People’s Republic of China
and others.