SINGAPORE - China’s biggest grain trader has taken its next step to developing a major competitor to the traditional ‘Big 4’ global agribusiness giants, ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus. Through a joint venture with sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp, COFCO will merge its majority holdings in Dutch trader Nidera and Noble Agri into a new entity, COFCO International Holdings, to be managed by newly hired Noble Agri CEO Matt Jansen, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Once the Nidera and Noble Agri units are combined, COFCO’s own domestic business will be merged into COFCO International to create a global crop origination chain with an unrivalled footprint in China, according to a source with one of the firms. “Currently, the integration has started and in the future COFCO International will be the platform to integrate related business to make it a global agribusiness company which operates from upstream to downstream products,” COFCO said in a statement. Market trackers say the new company could have a major impact on global grain trade flows once fully integrated. “It is sort of adding a fifth wheel and it will be significant, given the scale they have. I think it will be a major player,” said Paul Deane, senior agricultural economist at ANZ Bank in Melbourne. “The other significance is on the consumption side, given they have a large China domestic focus. They have natural strength there when you consider that, in the next five or ten years, you would expect China’s imports of agricultural commodities are going to be one of the growth areas.” COFCO’s transformation from a domestic procurement agency into a global powerhouse within a few years would mark a significant development in global crop trading as the company is widely viewed as the best-informed trader in China’s grain and oilseed markets, the world’s largest and fastest growing. In recent years COFCO has also diversified into downstream activities such as milling, soybean crushing and pig breeding. It has also expanded into branded foodstuffs and markets high-end products such as its Great Wall wine, chocolate and edible oils. Last month, COFCO Chairman Ning Gaoning said a listing of the company’s merged agriculture assets could take place in the next three to five years.