On October 9, Director of the BRICS Competition Centre Alexey Ivanov spoke at the roundtable of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy on the topic “On the Development of the BRICS Exchange Trading System”, held in Moscow.
The event was attended by Mikhail Arakelyan, Head of the Department of Supervision of Trading and Clearing Infrastructure Organizations, Financial Market Infrastructure Department, Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia); representatives of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, the Ministry of Energy of the Russian Federation, universities, and the professional community. The discussion was moderated by Ivan Abramov, First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy.
Alexey Ivanov presented a report prepared by the experts of the BRICS Centre dedicated to the development of commodity and raw materials exchange trading in Russia and the coordination of efforts to establish a BRICS Commodity Exchange. He also presented a scientific report titled “From Fields to Futures: Competition, Financialization, and Digitalization in Global Grain Value Chains”, which was previously introduced in September at the IX BRICS International Competition Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
The report pays special attention to the activities of the global grain traders — ABCD+ (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus Company, plus COFCO, Olam, and others) — who, according to the authors, have long influenced the global grain market. It notes that grain trade is increasingly accompanied by financial speculation, which affects global price formation.
A commodity exchange, Ivanov emphasized, is a crucial tool for enhancing market transparency and promoting competition. In monopolized markets suffering from structural problems such as information asymmetry, exchange-based trading plays an essential role in improving fairness and openness. It helps establish more objective prices for socially important goods and raw materials. Commodity exchanges are, in a sense, pillars of the market economy, and their significance is hard to overestimate.
“The main task,” Ivanov stressed, “is to build an effective BRICS commodity trading system — transparent, sustainable, and protected from extreme forms of speculation and monopolization.”
One of the key proposals of the “From Farm to Futures” report is to involve BRICS antitrust regulators in the design of the BRICS Grain Exchange, an initiative put forward by the leaders of the BRICS countries.
The Kazan Declaration of the XVI BRICS Summit notes that the participants welcome Russia’s initiative to establish a BRICS Grain Exchange and support “its further development, including expansion to other agricultural sectors.”
“If implemented properly, this project could become a step toward reducing price volatility, improving pricing transparency, and enhancing market competition in the global grain market,”
said Alexey Ivanov.
Participants of the roundtable discussed the phased creation of a common BRICS commodity exchange market, the introduction of standardized on-exchange and off-exchange price indicators, the use of shared commodity trading platforms within BRICS+, and the integration of various trading systems. Another important topic was ensuring that the new system serves not only large corporations but also small participants, including producers and consumers of agricultural products from different countries.
Among other speakers were: Dmitry Nekrasov, Director Department for Foreign Economic Activity Development and Regulation, Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation; Anatoly Golomolzin, Deputy Chairman of the Commission on Communications and ICT of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP); Stanislav Dmitrov, Deputy CEO of Eastern Exchange JSC; Pavel Ivanov, Managing Director of St. Petersburg Exchange JSC, and others.
