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Guest Post - A new measure for intellectual property rights systems in agriculture

24/8/2015

 
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Though the Cultivating Innovation project has now ended, we promised/threatened that we would be back with follow-up posts and further discussion of all things plants and IP. This week Mercedes Campi and Alessandro Nuvolari have taken the time to introduce some of their research to a wider audience, more specifically their recently published index of intellectual property rights tailored for agriculture.

Intellectual property (IP) protection systems for plant varieties are the outcome of a complex historical process that has taken place at a differential rate across the world. Broadly speaking, there are two main forms of IP protection for plant varieties: patents and plant breeders’ rights (PBRs). Both of them grant a temporally limited exclusive control over the propagating material and the harvested material of a new plant variety. However, a PBR is a form of IP protection especially designed to protect plant varieties and, as such, it takes into consideration some of their specific attributes. Some countries have neglected for years the consideration of plant varieties as subject of IP protection. Others early provided different instruments for their IP protection, including patents. Others have adopted sui generis systems that consider the specificities of plant varieties. The heterogeneity in the evolution of the patterns of legislation suggests that the construction of an indicator of intellectual property rights (IPRs) for plant varieties may contribute to enhancing our understanding of the effect of IPRs on agriculture.

The ratification of the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in 1994 has resulted in the adoption of tighter IPR systems, also affecting sectors that were not subject of intellectual property protection until recently. Moreover, developing countries with labile regimes or without IPR systems have recently adopted strong IP protection to comply with the demands of TRIPS. The resulting process of strengthening and harmonization of IPR systems has raised several concerns. In agriculture, IPR systems and their social and economic effects are a particularly controversial issue and the assessment of the merits and limitations of different IPRs regimes in this domain is particularly complex.

A proper appraisal of this problem requires consideration of an intricate array of thorny policy issues, ranging from the suitability of patents versus sui generis forms of intellectual property protection as the most appropriate incentive system for stimulating innovations, to the moral and ethical aspects revolving around the consideration of living organisms as inventions. Furthermore, recent developments in molecular biology applied to agriculture have contributed to increasing the complexity of this landscape. Genetically modified varieties may now be regarded as composed by different elements (the plant variety itself and its related gene), which can be protected by different types of IPRs and can even be owned by different actors. In this way, plant breeding has become an economic activity that is at the very core of the interests of major multinational companies involved in the production of genetically modified seeds. These developments have inevitably triggered conflicts, disputes and lobbying actions around intellectual property (IP) protection for seeds.

Several episodes illustrate the significance that intellectual property rights for plant varieties and agricultural products in general have attained in the world economy. In 2005 and 2006, Monsanto began a systematic campaign of infringement suits against importers of Argentinian soybean products and by-products to Europe. In brief, the root of the controversy was that Monsanto’s patent on the “Roundup Ready” (RR) soybean gene had been denied in Argentina but it had been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO). Thus, Monsanto argued that imports from Argentina of soybean related products containing the RR gene were liable for infringement. Monsanto was successful in obtaining the impoundment of several shipments of soybean-related products in Spain, the UK and the Netherlands. Soybean and its by-products were and still are the major export staple of Argentina (representing more than 50% of agricultural exports). To date, both a UK court and the European Court of Justice have ruled against Monsanto. To cite another example, in 2012, the United States and Colombia signed a trade agreement establishing that Colombian farmers could only use “certified seeds”, effectively prohibiting the widespread practice of self-reproduction of seeds. This decision triggered a wave of major protests, strikes and demonstrations all over the country, which finally forced the government to suspend the infamous “seed law”.

In a recent article: M. Campi and A. Nuvolari, (2015), “Intellectual property protection in plant varieties. A worldwide index (1961-2011)”, Research Policy, Vol. 44 (4), 951-964, we have proposed a new index that provides a synthetic quantitative characterization of the relative strength of IP protection on agriculture at the country level for 69 developed and developing countries for the period 1961-2011.

The index has been constructed by means of a detailed study of the historical evolution of the legislation in each country. Our approach has been thoroughly comparative from the outset: we have tried to identify the key-features characterizing the differences of IPR systems for plant varieties at the country level and we have developed a simple approach for transforming these features into quantitative indicators. The countries included in our sample were members of the UPOV convention by 2011. These countries have IP protection systems that are characterized by a rather similar basic legal framework, which follows certain guidelines provided by UPOV and TRIPS. Thus, they have systems that are likely to be compared. The index considers the elements that, within this common framework, tend to vary more from country to country and over time. The five components of the index are: i) ratification of UPOV conventions, ii) farmers' exception, iii) breeders' exception, iv) protection length, and v) patent scope. Subsequently, we have aggregated these indicators in a composite index. For any country in a given year, the index can take a score from 0 to 5 with higher scores indicating stronger intensity of IPR protection (it is possible to access the full data of the index for the panel of countries here).

Although IPRs are believed to be incentives for innovation activities, their effect is not clear neither from a theoretical perspective nor from an empirical point of view. This is because the effect of IPRs is technology and sector specific and also depends on the development level of countries. Being a quantitative indicator of the relative strength of IPR systems, we hope that the index will be a useful tool for unravelling broad patterns of correlation between IPR systems and indicators of innovation and economic performance such as R&D investment, productivity, technology transfer, trade and GDP. We have already used this index to study the effect of IPRs on trade and mergers and acquisitions in the agricultural sector and we have ongoing research projects using the index to address the effect of IPRs on agricultural productivity. In the article, we also provided an exploratory appraisal of the connection between our index and other variables and indicators by means of two econometric exercises. In the first one, we investigated the possible determinants of the strength of IP protection for plant varieties at the country level. In the second one, we examined the correlation between the index and agricultural production. The evidence we found is consistent with the notion that IPRs do not affect developed and developing countries in the same way.

In sum, we hope that the construction of a new indicator explicitly focused on IP protection in agriculture will be a useful tool for researchers interested in assessing the effects of IPRs on innovation, growth, technology transfer, trade and productivity in this sector.

ALESSANDRO NUVOLARI
Associate Professor of Economic and Social History at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa. His research interests are mostly focused on the role played by science and technology in the emergence and consolidation of “modern economic growth” with a particular focus on the Industrial Revolution in England. At the moment, he is also studying the relationship between intellectual property systems and economic performance both in historical and contemporary contexts.


MERCEDES CAMPI
PhD in Economics from Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies; Pisa, Italy. Master of Historical Research of the University of San Andrés. Degree in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires. Researcher at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Political Economy at the University of Buenos Aires IIEP-Baires (UBA-CONICET). Previously, research fellow at Laboratory of Management & Economics (LEM) & Institute of Economics, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies. Research interests: Technological Change; Innovation and Economic Development; Intellectual Property Rights; Agriculture; Biotechnology.

Teaching materials and project sign off...for now!

11/8/2015

 
We are pleased to announce our teaching materials are now available on our resources page. These explain intellectual property within the broader context of intellectual ownership, adopting and adapting the IP-narrow/IP-broad framework developed by historians of science Gregory Radick and Christine MacLeod. They were written with A-level students and first year undergraduates in mind, but will hopefully prove stimulating for anyone interested in rethinking or rediscovering what makes intellectual property an important and exciting topic.

While initially we had planned to design these materials specifically for biology students, we eventually made them more general, firstly because the key curricula we were working with (in biology) were undergoing revision, but also because the aspects of intellectual property that we wished to explain could be applied to any given subject, so specialisation at this point was not necessary. There are two materials. The first is a pamphlet, which explains what intellectual property might mean provided we analyse its component parts, which are otherwise left to overlap. The cover features a striking image of Damien Hirst's For the Love of God, which the artist was kind enough to allow us to reproduce for free. To those who may not know, this is an interesting object for thinking about intellectual property, and one that we hope students will find particularly stimulating. We were inspired to use this artwork thanks to reading Putting Intellectual Property in its Place by Laura J. Murray, S. Tina Piper, and Kirsty Robertson. The second teaching resource we have provided is a set of discussion prompts and tasks for teachers to use. They introduce to students:

  • What a concept like intellectual ownership is composed of.
  • The ways in which ownership claims influence their world.
  • The positive and negative consequences that can follow from having a strong sense of ownership over ideas/techniques/technologies etc.

We would greatly appreciate any feedback that you might care to offer having read these materials, and if you plan on using them yourself, please do get in touch.

The Cultivating Innovation project, funded by the AHRC, has now come to an end. This is not however an end for this website, or indeed necessarily the aims and goals of the project itself. After all, you can relive the interdisciplinary conference whenever you so wish via YouTube. The project researcher, Dominic Berry, will continue to write the occasional blog post on this site and make use of the community established on Twitter, as he continues to investigate IP in contemporary bioscience from a historical perspective. More specifically he will be engaged as a Research Fellow on the 'Engineering Life' project (led by Jane Calvert), looking at the ways in which synthetic biologists are managing their intellectual property. Gregory Radick will be further exploring the IP-narrow/IP-broad dynamic, mainly through a closer study of how Mendelian genetics came to be prized as one of the most productive sciences of the twentieth century, but also by revisiting the story of human gene patenting, expanding on his first paper on this area. Graeme Gooday will be continuing to develop his research into the history of technology and intellectual property beyond his award winning Patently Contestable, co-authored with Stathis Arapostathis. In particular he will be building on his more recent Rethinking Patent Cultures project, which will soon begin to yield new edited collections, including a volume dedicated to global patent cultures from a historical perspective.

Lastly it remains for us to thank all of our collaborators and academic advisors. We wish to give particular thanks to Bruce Pearce of the Organic Research Centre, who has been an excellent collaborator and provided insights that Berry in particular benefited from greatly. Mercedes Campi has been a great friend to the project, and provided numerous blog posts on her research and up to date information about the ever shifting world of IP (and we hope to host much more of her work soon), while Mrinalini Kochupillai and Lindsay Gledhill provided extensive and excellent feedback on the teaching materials (all faults remain Berry's!) Mike Ambrose and Sarah Wilmot were crucial to making the international conference, hosted at the John Innes Centre, a success, while both also gave generously with their time and expertise (in the contemporary plant sciences and the history of the plant sciences respectively). 

That's all for now folks. We hope you've enjoyed it. 

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