Intellectual Property Rights, Farmer Rights and Plant Genetic Conservation: An Overview

Inventions are based on novel and useful ideas. Those ideas are the intellectual property of the inventors and they should be recognised and sufficiently rewarded in order to make inventors disclose the idea to the benefit of the society. Though industrial patents were in existence for a long time, plants and other live organisms were not patentable. In order to encourage research on plant breeding US Government passed legislations in 1930, 1970 and by 1985 patent protection was extended to seeds as well. Meanwhile the International Union for Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) revised the plant breeders right in 1991 and eliminated breeder’s exemption and farmer’s privileges. In order to make the developing countries toe the line of the North the access to the export market for the developing countries was made contingent upon their progress in protecting intellectual property. The industrialised North though technologically superior is poor in terms of plant genetic resources. The majority of seed in gene banks of the West originated from the fields and forests of the developing countries. The developing countries campaigned for the recognition of the contributions made by their farmers in selecting and preserving the genetic diversity of different crops. In order to make these farmers continue their interest in their traditional crops for future plant breeding their contributions need to be acknowledged and rewarded. Though preserving biodiversity of wild plants and other species may be relatively easy, preserving the landraces poses many tough questions.