Abstract
US wheat varieties are examined for differential disease resistance between public and private varieties, an issue for critics of plant intellectual property. Analysis using disease resistance rankings of wheat varieties from Kansas and Texas indicate that private varieties are as or more resistant. This finding was further confirmed with two years of Texas data. Thus, the results from the study reject the criticism of private breeding activities that they are more susceptible to disease compared to public varieties. However, private varieties resistance is incorporated from public offerings so that productive private wheat breeding is partly derivative.
Highlights
Among the issues in the ongoing debate over the application of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to plants is the question of the productivity of private and/or protected varieties
The analysis effectively focused on Plant Variety Protection (PVP) as to date relatively few wheat varieties have been patented
Except for stripe rust and powdery mildew, the results of statewide analysis presented in Table 1 suggest that the disease resistance rankings are significantly different between public and private varieties, leading to rejecting the null hypothesis
Summary
Among the issues in the ongoing debate over the application of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to plants is the question of the productivity of private and/or protected varieties. That study focused on wheat varieties because of the significant involvement of both the public and private sectors in developing varieties, allowing for a meaningful comparison. The significant involvement of the public sector in wheat breeding means there is a substantial comparative variety testing program from which performance data are available. The present study focuses on wheat varieties for the same reason as the earlier analysis, the involvement of both the public and private sectors in plant breeding, as well as the availability of comparative trials. The issues examined are general as to the crop, but due to data availability they are evaluated here only for wheat. The often repeated example of poor resistance-based crop losses is that of the 1970 southern corn leaf blight. Development and release of varieties with specific single gene resistance, increase of new races of the pathogen, and new epidemics have been well documented.” In many cases, genetic resistance is the only effective control, or at least the only economically viable control [4]
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