Competition in U.S. agricultural markets has been shaped and reshaped over the course of decades by a number of factors. These include long-standing statutory exemptions from the U.S. antitrust laws for some forms of agricultural business organizations, changes in regulation, advances in technology, the rise of intellectual property protection, and globalization. More recent changes, however, have fundamentally altered the landscapes of domestic and global agricultural markets. This has been driven largely by horizontal and vertical consolidation, which has created tight oligopolies and by the emergence of powerful players at critical stages in increasingly complex agricultural supply chains.