Competition, Antitrust, and Agricultural Development in Asia

Competition law—also known as antitrust in some jurisdictions—has become part of governments’ policy arsenal to achieve efficient and welfare-improving market outcomes. From only a handful of economies in North America and Europe, the adoption of competition law and policy has spread rapidly to Asian economies since 1990. Like their Western counterparts several decades earlier, most Asian jurisdictions have exempted agriculture, albeit in varying degrees, from the prohibitions of competition law, such as those involving the exercise of market power by farmers’ associations. Public choice considerations suggest that the exemption serves as a countervailing force for the farmers’ comparatively weak position in the balance of political influence for agricultural policy and in bargaining power over the more concentrated wholesale-retail segments of the agri-food value chain. Farm heterogeneity and farm-operation consolidation, induced in part by the economy’s structural transformation, weaken the case for broad exemption.