Assessing the Implications of Intellectual Property Rights on Plant and Animal Agriculture

Abstract

Many readers, over their careers, will have shared my experience of initiating some really innovative work, only to learn that it had been done, and done better, thirty years earlier. That is one key attraction of research on intellectual property rights (IPRs) for plants and animals; they are, in the main, very recent, so whatever one does cannot have a direct antecedent. Indeed, to date, little economic research has been completed on the implications of expanding IPR protection for living agricultural inputs. Protection in the United States for asexually propagated plants has been available since 1930 (1990 in Canada), for sexually propagated plants for over twenty-five years, and for patented plants for a dozen years (see below). However, only in the last year has significant acreage of patented bioengineered plants (some 2.5 + million in total) been planted, with higher levels going in the ground in the United States and Canada as this paper is being drafted. Those crops are primarily herbicide-resistant beans, canola, and corn; Bt-producing corn, cotton, and potatoes; and virus-resistant squash (James and Krattiger). Only one livestock application (to my knowledge) has been patented (a pig in Australia with a controllable growth hormone), but as yet it is not a commercial product. What has been explored extensively in the literature are expressed concerns about IPRs on farm structure, ethics, university/industry relationships, information exchange, and related matters (see, e.g., Kloppenburg). Nor is the debate limited to the United States or developed countries. The international enhancement of