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This paper reports a study into the historical and economic preconditions for the strategical development of agri-food corporations in the competitive economic space of Ukraine. Agri-food corporations are determined by us as corporations with a developed system of integration relations that are a non-agricultural enterprise, which produces agricultural products. It has been substantiated that their emergence is not a natural phenomenon but a systematic process of changing the phases of differentiation and integration in the national economy. In this case, the development of agri-food corporations was contributed to by the lack of institutions of effective antitrust control, the diversification of industrial and financial groups, the liberalization of foreign trade, as well as a rent-oriented behavior of economic agents. It has been shown that agri-food corporations currently utilize about a third of agricultural land while the size of some of them exceeds the land-use area of entire regions. At the same time, in terms of agricultural production efficiency, agri-food corporations outperform farms and disintegrated agricultural enterprises, as well as family-owned farms; they have more resources for the innovative development of agricultural production and for investment. Strategical development of agri-food corporations needs to develop its social responsibility in rural areas, intensification of public control over the impact on the agrarian sector, institutional system of state support of export. Under the conditions of the state regulation of monopolies and excessive corporatization of agrarian sector, agri-food corporations should constitute the core of food security in Ukraine, as well as form its competitiveness in foreign agricultural markets.
