Intellectual Propety : Protection and Innovation
Agricultural development in developing countries has benefited from the vast accessibility of plant and animal genetic resources, freedom to operate with the most modern scientific methods and technology spillovers.
as opposed to the industrialized world, agricultural research in developing countries is mostly in the public-sector domain. Public sector programs embrace the entirety of agricultural research, such as genetic resources, food, feed and fiber crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries, soil management, integrated pest control, post-harvest systems, and conservation of natural resources. Agricultural research has been the chief contributor to agricultural growth and economic development all throughout the globe. One success story in public research system was the improvement of crops that resulted to the Green Revolution which occurred between the 1940s and 1960s. There was a dramatic increase in food at lowered prices, and the benefits have been fairly allocated among the urban and rural poor. Regardless of previous successes, some experts believe that many developing countries throughout the world would continue to experience food insecurity, poverty and malnutrition in the next 20 years.
Experts worry whether the agricultural sector will have the capacity to produce adequate food and fiber, or the economy will have the ability to import needed food and fiber to back the rapid population growth. “Introducing new technologies that can transform an economy from subsistence agriculture to a more productive commercialized system is an essential component of the solution to projected food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty,” quips Carmen Peralta, director for information, documentation and technology transfer bureau of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines.
Agricultural systems, she adds, ought to be reinvigorated in such a manner that newly developed technologies can be infused into the cropping systems without “demeaning” natural resources and the ecology.
Because of globalization and trade liberalization, Asian Institute of Management Policy Center’s executive director Federico Macaranas snaps that developing countries are confronted with the dispute of enhancing their agricultural systems, so that their farmers can strive against the global economy.
He says: “Competitiveness in a global economy will be based on farmers’ ability to produce and profitably market their products at a low price, to provide important quality traits in the desired market classes, and to supply the needed volumes to meet both the processing and consumption demand for agricultural products.”
Global thing
What have contributed to reshaping the context for public research are the changes in the global international policy arena and trends in technology research, says Peralta.
As time evolves, the worth of intellectual property in the research and development sector in general-and the agricultural research sector in particular-has increased considerably.
“Concerns about the piracy and counterfeiting of intellectual property have been increasingly raised in industrialized countries, where much of the intellectual property resides,” reveals Peralta.
It was the reason why the protection of intellectual property was a major topic of negotiation at the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The end of the negotiations was the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to regulate the GATT, the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
The TRIPS agreement is an essential part of the WTO that requires all member countries to grant patents for inventions in all fields of technology. It requires them to protect plant varieties either by patents. Falling in with the TRIPS agreement for most member countries suggests introducing much stricter intellectual property protection (IPP), which is believed to have far-reaching consequences on the international transfer of technology and trade relationship between the industrialized and developing countries, particularly in agricultural research.
The growing significance of biotechnology and the privatization and consolidation of the agricultural research firms in industrialized countries were some of the forces behind the growing international pressure to adopt broader and stricter intellectual property rights (IPR).
“Biotechnology innovations are often proprietary in nature and reside in the private sector of the industrialized world where the legal framework is well developed in granting IPP to biological innovations,” explains Peralta, adding: “A growing number of research inputs are also protected as intellectual property. Because these innovations are privately owned, managed and protected through patents, plant variety protection, trademarks, copyrights and trade secret laws, they have restrictions placed on their use during the research and commercialization stage.”
She points out that agricultural development in developing countries has benefited from the vast accessibility of plant and animal genetic resources, freedom to operate with the most modern scientific methods and technology spillovers.
But the already-expanded IPR territories in the progressive countries and the IPR changes needed by the TRIPS agreement in the developing world, she continues, is anticipated to have immense impact on the way scientists exchange materials and ideas-and the way agricultural research is organized.
Inadequate, really
Implementing and managing intellectual property thus presents many complex decisions for agricultural scientists, research managers and policy makers. The Philippines, for one, is in the process of modifying their IPR systems and in many public organizations.
“But the current state of knowledge about the implications of stronger IPR regime on the public sector agricultural research is inadequate to help these offices address the complexity of decision-making faced by public agricultural research institutions,” says a critic, who requests anonymity.
He says even the expansion of IPRs to agriculture is still a major concern for policy makers and a constant topic of discussion and debate among the civil society. At the national level, the critic specifies that policy makers have to make resolutions based on the objective of attaining national developmental goals, like poverty alleviation, food security or expanding agricultural exports.
“In designing an IPR policy, they have to comply with the minimum global standards of IPR, while simultaneously safeguarding the interests of farmers and local entrepreneurs,” he says, stressing that the goal is to make the best agricultural technologies available to local producers.
Partnerships
The opportunity to protect plant and animal intellectual property raises several issues, opportunities and challenges for a public research institute.
“In making decisions about the use and protection of an intellectual property technology, a public research institute has to weigh benefits against the social costs to farmers and consumers, and the public expectation that all intellectual property created by a public research program should be made available free of cost and without restrictions,” the critic says.
While public agricultural research programs create innovations, seek to serve the public, and bring forth their products to market, partnerships with private companies become inexorable.
“The need for a private-sector intermediation to develop and market an agricultural product makes it necessary for a university to seek protection of its intellectual property,” tells Peralta.
“Protecting an innovation and assigning its production exclusively to one-or non-exclusively to more than one-company may be the most sought-after action to make sure of the promotion and utilization of an innovation,” says Peralta.
