Innovation / rural finance products and process

Newspaper

Biotechnology and Development: A balance between IPR benefit-sharing

EJB Electronic Journal of Biotechnology ISSN: 0717-3458

In the IVth Century B.C. Aristoteles presented moral and philosophical arguments to reward inventors for their innovations. Since then and until the industrial revolution in Europe, only Philosophers dealt with these issues. With the industrial boom in the 19th century in Europe the need arose to protect inventions from being copied and thus ensure that the investment in innovations would be rewarded. On the other hand, there is a need to disclose innovations to the public to promote/facilitate further development based on existing innovations (Tansey, 1999). To ensure the both aspects of innovation (protection and publication) a legal protection, an Industrial or Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) system was created. During that time, the legislations on IPRs were designed to protect only industrial products since agricultural innovations did not play such an important role.In the beginning of the XXth agricultural innovation gained importance and consequently its protection but the mechanisms developed by then for this purpose (patents), were not appropriate to protect new plant varieties, basically for three reasons. First, one of the requisites to obtain a patent is, that the invention should really incorporate an inventive step (non-obviousness) what does not apply to new plant varieties created by selection and crossing of already existing varieties. Second, a patent requires an exact description of the innovation and the process to obtain it. This resulted not only difficult but, in most cases impossible. However a pure publication of the description of the material, in contrast to industrial innovations, is of no use for further investigation – the protected variety must be physically available. Third, patent protection was considered to be too strong for new varieties and thus hinder a more dynamic development of the agricultural sector since there are traditional and accepted rights and habits of farmers as for instance the saving, re-use and exchange of seeds which are restricted under patent protection. To overcome the above mentioned constraints, a new concept to protect plant varieties, the Plant Breeders Rights (PBRs) system, was designed. After a description of the international framework for IPR related to genetic resources and the access to these resources, difficult question arises: How governments apply these concepts at national level in Latin America and the Caribbean? How do they get the balance right between protection of IPRs of innovations, access to genetic resources and the fair distribution of benefits? Answering to these questions and at the same time, pointing out the main practical problems of the implementation of the mentioned concepts, require an analysis of the previous and on-going Latin American experiences.

You can also read linked documents for this article.