A key reason is that agricultural production has few technical (dis) economies of scale, implying that a range of production forms can coexist. A look at the 300 or so publicly listed companies in table 4 illustrates this point. Even though farming accounts for 22 percent of the global agricultural value chain, it makes up a mere percent of equity market capitalization. As of October 2009, there were only seven publicly listed farming companies worldwide, three in Brazil and Argentina and four in Ukraine and Russia. By contrast, agricultural processing, input industries, and sometimes output markets are characterized by.
