Prima facie reasons to question enclosed intellectual property regimes and favor open-source regimes for germplasm

Abstract

In principle, intellectual property protections (IPPs) promote and protect important but costly investment in research and development. However, the empirical reality of IPPs has often gone without critical evaluation, and the potential of alternative approaches to lend equal or greater support for useful innovation is rarely considered. In this paper, we review the mounting evidence that the global intellectual property regime (IPR) for germplasm has been neither necessary nor sufficient to generate socially beneficial improvements in crop plants and maintain agrobiodiversity. Instead, based on our analysis, the dominant global IPR appears to have contributed to consolidation in the seed industry while failing to genuinely engage with the potential of alternatives to support social goods such as food security, adaptability, and resilience. The dominant IPR also constrains collaborative and cumulative plant breeding processes that are built upon the work of countless farmers past and present. Given the likely limits of current IPR, we propose that social goods in agriculture may be better supported by alternative approaches, warranting a rapid move away from the dominant single-dimensional focus on encouraging innovation through ensuring monopoly profits to IPP holders.

From Transition to Domains of Transformation: Getting to Sustainable and Just Food Systems through Agroecology

“…For example, resistance to appropriative "Western" intellectual property approaches while favoring access to locally-developed and/or traditional genetic material, open-source intellectual property regimes, and decentralized, participatory approaches to seed saving, selection, exchange, and livestock breeding can be powerful tools to support and enable agroecology. They however often go "against the grain" of dominant intellectual property and industrial farming systems and are often significantly under-resourced [50]. More broadly, approaches rooted in localized, participatory, empowered "commons" regimes offer powerful examples and models [50,51] that are particularly well-suited to the notions of cooperation and community self-organization.…”

“…They however often go "against the grain" of dominant intellectual property and industrial farming systems and are often significantly under-resourced [50]. More broadly, approaches rooted in localized, participatory, empowered "commons" regimes offer powerful examples and models [50,51] that are particularly well-suited to the notions of cooperation and community self-organization.…”

“…As in the enabling conditions, disabling dynamics around the control of water and other resources are quite similar to those facing land. Privatization, displacement, and dispossession of local communities, and excessive control by private interests of water, seeds, breeds, and other material elements of diversity, block the possibilities for community-self organization for agroecology in these areas, decreasing adaptability and resilience [50,58,59]. Other large-scale challenges to ecosystem access and use include armed conflict, climate change, and "financialization" of agriculture [60].…”

Domain A: Rights and Access to Nature—Land, Water, Seeds and Biodiversity

“…Agroecology focuses on indigenous, locally adapted, genetically diverse and traditional crops, so access to such seeds is central to the practice. Rights to such seeds, and decentralized, community-led seed saving, selection and plant breeding, hold great potential for innovations, resilience and livelihoods in agroecology (Halpert and Chappell 2017;Mulvaney 2020). Published research on participatory management of livestock diversity and breeding is limited (Conroy 2008), but considering their promise and the amount of relevant unmet needs in this area, models such as these also need significantly increased resources in terms of supportive policy and monetary and human resources for careful research and implementation.…”

Developing Heterotic Groups for Successful Hybrid Breeding in Perennial Ryegrass

“…To broaden the genetic diversity within breeding programs, plants are often shared between breeding companies [9]. Occasionally, sharing is the result of collaborations, but mostly, plants are selected from available cultivars by making use of breeders' privilege [9,10]. This practice leads to genetically-related plant material within and between breeding programs.…”