Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Food - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 392

enable them to strike a balance between TRIPS/UPOV norms and the rights of farmers
and breeders.
What constitutes a “balanced” plant variety protection regime and how to develop
a “sui generis” system that is “balanced” and still is TRIPS compliant is an important
issue.17 Seed industry development and providing incentives for innovation in plant
breeding cannot be separated from intellectual property rights concerning plant variety.
Striking a balance to safeguard different interests of various stakeholders is not an easy
task. The sheer diversity in implementing the provisions of the TRIPS agreement and
the UPOV Convention indicates that intellectual property protection for plant varieties
is contested terrain, and it will remain so for years to come.
Plant Biotechnology and Intellectual
Property Rights
Since the 1990s transgenic technology has transformed the development of new vari-
eties with desired traits. Areas under genetically modified (GM) crops have expanded
dramatically. Patenting of plant biotechnology innovations has increased rapidly; it is
estimated that more than a thousand patents have been granted for transgenic plants
in the United States alone. In agricultural biotechnology, different components, such
as vectors, genes of interest, selectable marker genes, and methods of gene transfer, are
deployed. Many of these have been patented; as a result, the patenting of seeds, plant
varieties, and processes and components used in plant transformation technology has
resulted in a proliferation of patents related to plant biotechnology.18
In the case of Golden Rice—transgenic rice developed to overcome Vitamin A defi-
ciency—commercialization necessitated access to seventy-two patents held by forty
different organizations (see Stein, this volume). This constraint was overcome by
agreement by patent holders to the use of technology for humanitarian purpose with
some conditions; the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board was formed for this purpose.
Otherwise the technology would have encountered difficulty in gaining access to pat-
ented technologies or would have become expensive as patent holders are entitled to
royalties.19 But Golden Rice should be considered an exception; in most cases, the tech-
nology is commercialized by the private sector or licenses are provided to seed compa-
nies for using the technology. Seed companies can then incorporate the patented genes
in the varieties developed and released by them.
In contrast, when the Green Revolution was launched, plant breeding and seed
production were mostly done by public-sector institutions, including International
Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs). The private sector provided agrochemical
inputs. Public-sector institutions developed and provided open pollinated varieties
(OPVs) that could be replanted without any reduction in the yield in subsequent gen-
erations. While hybrids were also developed, public-sector institutions did not behave