The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the current status of research and commercial use of Genetically Modified (GM) crops worldwide, and quantify the importance of various policies, particularly intellectual property rights, in the spread of biotechnology research in commercial products. It is evident from available data that most of the applied agricultural biotech research is conducted by the private sector, of which, a substantial contribution is by multinational corporations. Econometric analysis suggests that plant breeders' rights and the ability to patent plants are associated with the spread of applied biotech research.
Plant
breeders, biotechnology scientists, and the firms that own
biotechnology inventions try to charge royalties for use
of their inventions or prevent people or firms from copying
their inventions so that they can sell their invention at
a high enough price to profit from their investment in research
and development. They control the use of their inventions
by using legal means such as patents, plant breeder's rights,
and trademarks. They also control their use by keeping inventions
or key parts of their inventions secret, which in some countries
are protected by trade secrecy law. They also protect their
inventions by biological means such as putting new characteristics
into hybrid cultivars or including other technical means
to prevent copying (i.e., the Genetic Use Restriction Techniques
(GURTs) or Terminators). In a few cases, countries give
one company a monopoly on the production and sales of a
particular commodity.
Laws
to protect new plant varieties and biotech inventions spread
rapidly in developing countries in the late 1990s. Their
spread was accelerated by the Intellectual Property Rights
(IPRs) component of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement
which required the signatories to put in place, a type of
sui generis system of plant variety protection and
patent protection for biotechnology inventions by 2000 (some
developing countries have until 2005 to implement these
IPRs). As of December 1, 2001, 49 States were members of
the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties
of Plants (UPOV), which indicates that they have some plant
variety protection. A number of countries still exclude
novel plants and animals from patent coverage, although
many of them do allow patenting of novel microbes as is
required by the WTO. |
