Category: Intellectual property rights

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Nibbles: Quinoa to and fro, Pasta past, Madagascar prospecting, Hunger games, Livestock genetics, Smallholder technologies, Wheat LOLA, ESA and the ITPGRFA, Development and the CAP, Conservation agriculture, Development in hard places, Food & culture exhibition

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TraitAbility and the Treaty

I don’t know enough about either vegetable breeding or intellectual property protection to venture a guess as to the significance to that industry of Syngenta’s new online effort to streamline the licensing of some of their varieties and associated enabling technologies, which they’re calling TraitAbility. I’m not even sure what success would look like, either for Syngenta or anybody else. Alexander Tokarz, Syngenta’s Head of Vegetables ((Not just Head of Lettuce, he is the first to point out.)) suggested at last week’s event accompanying the launch of the TraitAbility portal that he might well be happier if other companies were to follow suit with similar opening-up initiatives in the next couple of years than if he were to be inundated with e-licenses from day one. Full disclosure: I know that because I was there, at Syngenta’s invitation:

No word yet from either those other companies, potential licensees, or indeed growers. But nevermind all that. I still think TraitAbility may turn out to be quite important, for two related reasons. First, because it’s a clear parallel to the International Treaty, at least in the sense that — in albeit a smaller, more halting way, and at the other end of the variety development pipeline — it is ostensibly trying to make access to genetic diversity and technologies simpler and more transparent. Which suggests the intriguing possibility that the ITPGRFA, if it didn’t actually force anyone’s hand, at least in some way paved the way, or helped create the space, for what Syngenta at any rate is heralding as something of an innovation. And second, because, whether or not there was in fact such a causal link with the ITPGRFA, the parallel which is indubitably there might suggest to Syngenta that some of that license money should maybe flow back into conservation. Innovation is needed all along that pipeline to make it sustainable, not just at the business end.

LATER:

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How to fix plant breeding

Big Picture Agriculture is a great source of stories about, er, the big picture in agriculture. Catching up with Kay I came across this beaut:

GM labeling activist movements are misguided. Fred Kaufman explains that the real problem lies in U.S. plant patent laws which have done more harm than good, overall. Food patent laws stand in the way of good scientific research.

The most direct and efficient way to undermine the food industrialist monopoly of the molecular seed business is to reform these laws (particularly the utility patent law of 1985), and make food property rights less exclusive, less lucrative, and less enduring. … Instead of tilting at the windmill of food labels, food nonprofits should hire a fleet of I.P. lawyers and send them to Washington to demand reform of the Plant Patent Act. When there’s less profit in genetic modification, things will get better for consumers, farmers, and scientists—pretty much everyone except corporate executives.

I really have nothing to add.

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Unconventional wisdom on biodiversity conventions

As the Convention on Biological Diversity catches its breath after the recent Conference of the Parties in Hyderabad, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture lumbers towards the First Meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Advisory Committee on Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in a couple of weeks time, an onlooker could find himself suffering extreme policy fatigue.

The proper restorative is to take a look at Jim Chen’s forthcoming paper on Bioprospect Theory. This from the abstract:

Indeed, legal approaches to biodiversity and to biotechnology are so twisted that they represent an extreme application of prospect theory. Losing supposedly hurts worse than winning feels good. The law of biodiversity and biotechnology appears to reverse this presumption. Biodiversity loss is staggering and undeniable. Humans are responsible for the sixth great extinction spasm of the Phanerozoic Eon. By contrast, gains from bioprospecting are highly speculative. Even if they are ever realized, they will be extremely concentrated. There is no defensible basis for treating ethnobiological knowledge as the foundation of a coherent approach to global economic development.

In spite of these realities, the global community continues to spend its extremely small and fragile storehouse of political capital on this contentious corner of international environmental law. Global economic diplomacy should be made of saner stuff. The fact that it is not invites us to treat the entire charade as a distinct branch of behavioral law and economics: bioprospect theory.

I’m not alone in thinking that the pharmaceutical industry has a lot to answer for in the madness that is global policy on genetic resources, especially those for food and agriculture. But I also suspect there’s no other game in town.

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Nibbles: Animal abolitionism and not, Patents and not, Early agriculture, Brogdale, Soybean genes, Fancy phenotyping, Nexus principles, ICRAF databases, Transformation, Pest posters