ABCD traders, Cargill, Minneapolis
Indicative delayed market price: a tension gauge, distinct from the physical flow. A rise signals the input tightening.
ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus traded about 540 Mt of grains and oilseeds in 2022, or ≈60% of global volumes, older estimates cite 70 to 90%, the range remaining contested for want of transparency from these mostly unlisted groups. They control silos, port terminals and freight. The Bunge-Viterra merger (2025) tightens the oligopoly further.
The oligopoly that does not own the grain
The power of the ABCD rests on what they see and what they hold, not on what they grow, they grow almost nothing: silos, port terminals, chartering fleets, and above all a global information on harvests that neither states nor farmers possess. They earn less from owning the grain than from the spreads, the geographic arbitrages and the volatility.
This is why shocks enrich them: 2022, marked by the war in Ukraine and the grain panic, handed ADM, Bunge and Cargill record profits, before a clear pullback in 2024-2025. This asymmetry, the world worries about running short of wheat while the intermediary banks the fear, reveals a logistical and informational bottleneck, not a production monopoly.
A concentration that accelerates
Transparency is here the blind spot of the diagnosis: three of the four giants are private or family-owned (Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Bunge apart on the American side), with no obligation to publish their volumes. The range itself, 60 % for recent estimates, up to 70-90 % for older ones, is a symptom: one cannot precisely measure what these groups prefer to keep quiet.
The Bunge-Viterra merger, finalized in July 2025 for about 34 billion dollars, tightens the vise further by creating a player comparable in weight to Cargill or ADM. The "BCD" is gradually replacing the "ABCD": fewer players, more infrastructure under a single hand, and a growing concentration on one link, trading, on which the planet's plate depends.