Global Food Value Chains and Competition Law

Ioannis Lianos is the President of the Hellenic Competition Commission and Professor of Global Competition Law and Policy at the Faculty of Laws, University College London (UCL). Alexey Ivanov is the Director of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Center and the HSE–Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development, and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE). Dennis Davis, Judge at the High Court of South Africa, served as judge president of the Competition Appeal Court of South Africa for 20 years. He is also an honorary professor in the Department of Commercial Law at the University of Cape Town.

• 1. Global food value chains: A conceptual guide; 2. Rents, power and governance in global value chains; 3. The financialization of land and agriculture: Mechanisms, implications and responses; 4. Agriculture, End to End; 5. New forms of financing the agricultural sector in Brazil: The experience of the soybean Chain; 6. Economic concentration and the food value chain: Legal and economic perspectives; 7. The state of American competition law with respect to the food chain; 8. The Brazilian food value chain and competition policy: An overview of CADE's role – Centrality and inadequacy; 9. Competition concerns in fertilizer import-dependent countries like India and China: Analysing the agrium-potashcorp merger; 10. Russian competition policy over value chains in agricultural and food sectors; 11. The Pioneer/Pannar merger, The maize seed value chain and globalisation; 12. Power in the food value chain: Theory & metrics; 13. Efficiency and fairness: Interdependent discourses in supermarket-supplier relations; 14. China's legal regulation of the abuse of market power by large retailers; 15. Superior bargaining power in Russian contract and competition law; 16. Regulating unfair trading practices in the EU food supply chain: Between market making and market correcting; 17. Food chain certification and the social pluralism of competition law; 18. Hunger games: Connecting the right to food and competition law; 19. Agribiotech patents in the food supply chain: A U.S. perspective; 20. Mergers and product innovation: Seeds and GM crops; 21. The global grain trade: From a ferrymen oligopoly to the sustainable bridge solution.

'This book is an invaluable contribution to the analysis of politically important, complex and often ignored competition issues related to the global food value chain. It discusses the intellectual property regime of fertilizers and seeds, the imbalance in negotiating power along the chain that have exploitative and exclusionary effects, the horizontal concentration reinforced by mergers and the role of international trade and cartels in a number of agricultural inputs, as well as the abuses of buying power by large scale retailers. It analyzes why competition law enforcement has largely failed to deal with those issues and provides a powerful and thought provoking invitation to rethink both the goals and the instruments we use. In short, it is a must read.' Frederic Jenny, President, OECD Competition Committee