How BRICS+ can tackle digital and agribusiness monopolies

Global expert Alexey Ivanov says BRICS+ strengthens negotiating power in technology and agriculture with coordinated antitrust measures and a proposed grain exchange.

We interviewed Professor Alexey Ivanov, a leading global expert on competition policy in the digital economy. He is director of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, one of the most influential research hubs shaping antitrust thinking across emerging markets.

Professor of law at HSE University in Russia and research scholar at IIASA, Ivanov has pioneered new analytical approaches to digital markets, global value chains and the growing interplay between financialization, data and market power.

For nearly a decade, he has also led the BRICS working group on global food value chains, producing some of the most comprehensive studies on the structural transformations in agriculture and commodity trade.

During his visit to Brazil, Ivanov took part in the 4th BRICS+ Digital Competition Forum, held in Rio de Janeiro on 27–28 November 2025, where senior officials, regulators, and scholars examined the state of digital markets, ex ante platform regulation, AI-driven competitive advantage, ecosystem theories of harm and the platformization of global agricultural chains.

During the event, Ivanov presented new findings on how digitalisation and financial integration are reshaping competition in the global grain trade – one of the most strategic sectors for BRICS economies.

In this interview, he reflects on the key debates of the forum, the challenges faced by regulators in rapidly evolving digital and industrial ecosystems, and why emerging economies are redefining the future of competition policy.

Read the full interview below.

Professor Ivanov, you opened the BRICS+ Forum discussing the current state of digital markets. In your view, what are today the main points of tension between the power of large platforms and the ability of competition authorities to intervene effectively?

Today, regulators around the world are trying to combat the problems of growing market power of digital giants and digital platforms. But this activity is often fragmented and unsystematic.

Regulatory approaches from the industrial era have come up against a new economic and social phenomenon: ecosystems. It is time to discuss what a new unified approach to antitrust regulation might look like.

Digital platforms and the digital ecosystems built on them — networks of suppliers and consumers formed around a single centre — have already taken centre stage in the digital economy and serve as a ‘one-stop shop’ for suppliers and consumers of goods and services.

McKinsey estimates that, by 2025, up to US$60 trillion (or 30% of global revenue) will pass through ecosystems. Modern competition law needs a comprehensive methodology for assessing how ecosystems work, how they compete with each other, how competition within ecosystems is structured and what opportunities exist for balancing them without destroying them.

The BRICS alliance plays a special role in the development of competition at the global level. There is no single antitrust regulatory regime in the world today, but there is hope for an interim scenario that could be implemented by the BRICS countries. BRICS is a flexible format and therefore the framework for cooperation within it is also flexible.

At the same time, antitrust law is an adaptive regulatory tool that allows for effective responses to rapidly changing conditions. We have the opportunity to develop a constructive mechanism for coordinating approaches to competition protection by the BRICS countries.

Brazil is moving forward with an ex ante regulatory proposal for digital platforms. In your opinion, what elements are essential for such a model to work in developing countries without stifling innovation?

The modern market is a chaotic, unpredictable environment. Those who are able to navigate it achieve success, sometimes by chance. This is radically different from the industrial era, when growth, revenue and efficiency were the result of clear strategy, expertise and planning.

The same applies to antitrust regulation. Today, it is important for regulators not so much to avoid mistakes as to understand that there will be no absolute predictability. This raises the question of how prepared we are to take reasonable risks when applying measures. The prevailing attitude today of “not overdoing it” and “not stifling innovation” has played its role, but perhaps it is time to reconsider it.

Regulators, especially in the digital age, need to be more flexible and entrepreneurial. Markets are capable of adapting to intervention, and sometimes it is intervention that becomes a catalyst for development. We need to move away from excessive caution and accept that in some cases the risk of under-regulation may be higher than the risk of excessive intervention.

The global grain market has historically been controlled by a few large international traders. In practice, how does this oligopolistic structure affect prices, volatility and food sovereignty for BRICS countries?

The global grain market is effectively shaped by a small group of international traders —ABCD+ — who control key logistics routes and much of the global value chain. Their dominance allows them to influence prices and amplify volatility, which harms both producers and consumers in BRICS countries, while benefiting traders whose revenues increasingly come from speculative operations.

Such concentration also limits food sovereignty: responsibility for global food security has, in practice, shifted from governments to private corporations. Even major BRICS exporters have little control over grain once it enters global circulation.

To rebalance this system, BRICS countries need coordinated action — both through joint antitrust measures and by creating alternative market mechanisms, such as a BRICS grain exchange — to strengthen their bargaining power and reduce dependence on oligopolistic traders.

Many experts argue that digitalisation has made essential parts of value chains invisible to regulators. Why do you consider the platformization of value chains — especially in agriculture — a blind spot for competition law?

A high level of digitalisation and control over critical infrastructure have transformed ABCD+ group companies into true agro-industrial ecosystems, whose economic power is underestimated by antitrust authorities. An example of this is the recent merger of Viterra and Bunge, which, despite the combined company’s enormous potential to influence the functioning of the value chain, did not meet with opposition from regulators.

The recent CADE decision involving the soy moratorium opened a debate on the role of competition in environmental issues. How should antitrust deal with cases that mix sustainability, sectoral agreements and concentrated economic power?

Documents published by CADE (Brazilian Administrative Council for Economic Defense) claim that the program facilitates exchange of commercially sensitive information among its participants that include the ABCD+ traders thus making the moratorium, essentially, an anticompetitive agreement under the guise of sustainability goals.

Developments like this prove that the nexus between traders’ market power and sustainability, now additionally strengthened by digital solutions, has been so far underinvestigated by competition authorities and might uncover previously undetected forms of market power abuse.

You argue that it is necessary to analyse not only horizontal competition but also vertical competition in value chains. How does this shift in perspective change how abuses or distortions in global trade are investigated?

Traditional antitrust analysis of the grain market has focused primarily on horizontal competition — the interaction between producers and traders at the same level of the supply chain. However, to gain a deeper understanding of market dynamics in the BRICS countries, an analysis of vertical competition is being conducted, which involves examining the relationships between different levels of the supply chain, including producers, traders, infrastructure operators and financial intermediaries.

This approach makes it possible to identify the influence of major players on the value chain and their ability to control both grain production and sales.

The forum also discussed artificial intelligence and platforms that capture value from users’ labour and data. What kinds of competitive advantages is AI creating, and what are the risks of a new wave of global concentration?

Market power concentration in the AI sector is already critically high. Experts at the BRICS Centre of the Higher School of Economics analysed AI value chains and the degree of economic control at each stage, from microchip production to basic model development.

Key segments of the chain, such as lithography and chip design, are dominated by one or two corporations with a share of over 90%. In particular, Nvidia controls about 95% of the market in the segment of specialised chip design. This is particularly worrying, as these areas are the most technologically advanced and decisive for the development of AI technologies as a whole.

This situation is developing not only at the global level, but also within jurisdictions friendly to Russia, including the BRICS countries. Although China, for example, is attempting to create alternative solutions, there has been no significant strengthening of the market positions of Chinese or other alternative manufacturers. Even competitive products such as the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek often rely on illegal supplies of Western technologies that are banned from export.

Today, humanity is once again in the midst of a technological revolution and it makes sense to seriously consider limiting the influence of modern big tech companies in the field of AI.

Global regulators are not yet keeping up with the pace of change, but they have already begun to take the first steps, including investigations into OpenAI and Microsoft. Although the measures remain weak and belated, the very fact of interest in the antitrust agenda gives hope, especially against the backdrop of discussions taking place in the BRICS countries.

It is particularly important to preserve and stimulate competition in countries that do not have their own IT giants. It is precisely the BRICS+ countries that could promote an international pro-competitive agenda in the field of AI.

Digital ecosystems allow a company to dominate multiple interconnected markets at once. What do authorities still not fully understand about this type of power and which regulatory tools do you consider necessary?

The complex nature of digital ecosystems dictates the need to adapt antitrust legislation to the realities of the new economy. Many IT giants (Tencent, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc) define themselves as ecosystems and represent flexible, adaptive structures — a phenomenon that cannot be grasped using the logic and regulatory tools of the industrial era.

Eco-antitrust, a method based on the analogy between digital and natural ecosystems, could be a suitable regulatory mechanism. Antitrust authorities can use a natural approach to regulation to the same extent that commercial companies have adopted ideas from ecology and biology to organise their strategies and business processes.

Antitrust emerged as an effective and adaptive tool in response to the inability of regulators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to grasp the nature of a new business — the first large trust, Standard Oil, which eluded regulatory measures.

Today, competition authorities in different countries are similarly unable to grasp the nature of digital ecosystems. The activities of law enforcement agencies are often fragmented and unsystematic. It is necessary to develop a common approach to competition regulation, as has been done in the areas of ecology and climate policy.

BRICS agencies are already applying environmental methodology to examine the behavior of players in digital markets, identify anti-competitive practices and analyse transactions.

See also

• Brazil hosts 4th BRICS+ Digital Competition Forum
• CADE takes part in international agenda on competition defence
• Visit the official event website: 4th BRICS+ Digital Competition Forum

Contextual notes

• The ABCD+ acronym refers to ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus Company + COFCO, Olam and others.
• The soy moratorium refers to an agreement that prohibits companies from purchasing soy grown in areas of the Amazon deforested after July 2008. The goal is to prevent recent deforestation from generating profit. However, farmers and associations argue that the agreement is anticompetitive, harms free enterprise and may economically affect municipalities dependent on agriculture, especially because deforestation for other activities (such as cattle ranching) continues.