IMPACT OF AGRICULTURAL HOLDING DOMINANCE ON COMPETITION AND LOGISTICS RESILIENCE IN UKRAINE’S GRAIN MARKET

Анотація

The paper addresses how the growing dominance of large agricultural holdings and vertically integrated trading groups reshapes competition and the resilience of Ukraine’s grain logistics infrastructure under wartime disruption. When transport corridors are constrained and costs surge, competitive advantage increasingly depends on controlling or securing access to critical logistics assets: storage and consolidation capacity, terminal throughput slots, railcar availability, contracting power with carriers, and the ability to switch routes across maritime, river and overland corridors. This shifts market rivalry from conventional price bargaining toward contestation over access conditions, queues, and allocation rules within infrastructure “bottlenecks”, while simultaneously concentrating systemic risk in a limited number of nodes and operators. The study combines market-structure reasoning (concentration and vertical integration) with network resilience concepts (critical nodes, interdependencies, redundancy and recovery speed). On this basis, the paper specifies an operational set of indicators suitable for subsequent empirical testing with Ukrainian statistical and sectoral data, including measures of exporter concentration, infrastructure ownership/control, access intensity to terminals and storage, route diversification, and exposure to node-level disruptions. The proposed approach is intended to support evidence-based policy discussions on competition safeguards, access governance, and investment priorities that jointly improve market contestability and the robustness of grain export logistics. Special attention is paid to the institutional design of non-discriminatory access and transparency of capacity allocation as preconditions for resilient, competitive logistics. The framework also makes it possible to assess how discriminatory capacity allocation, opaque queue management, and unequal bargaining power affect both market entry conditions and the ability of the grain export system to absorb and recover from repeated disruptions.

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