The globalization of agricultural and food trade has been hailed as a “big opportunity” for farmers and agribusiness entrepreneurs. However, considerations of quality, timeliness, and economies of scale have posed special challenges to smallholders (World Bank, 2008).  The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2009) sounds the oft-repeated alarm that “concentration in food production and distribution chains has been significantly increasing over the past years.  The resulting market structure gives buyers considerable bargaining strength over their suppliers, with potentially severe implications for the welfare both of producers and consumers (p. 5).” Benefits from growing international trade in agricultural products are believed to have been captured by a few firms that dominate key nodes of the global value chain, to the exclusion of small farmers and producers at the primary level, whilst undermining food affordability at the retail level.
However, detailed information about the organization of agro-industry firms engaged in international trade is scarce.  Understanding how trading firms have been organized based on empirically verifiable facts and causal factors is important for analyzing the distribution of trade benefits among firms and among their upstream or downstream links. This study, part of a wider analysis on the determination of the distribution of agricultural trade benefits among firms and stakeholders in developing countries, seeks to compile and synthesize related literature on the structure of agricultural trade industry in developing countries.2 The objectives are: 
 1) To review the theory and evidence on the structure of agricultural trade industry in     developing countries;  
 2) Based on a literature survey, to determine what causes the industry structure and     how it affects the distribution of trade benefits among firms. 