WTO TRIPS Agreement has been hailed
as the most far reaching and comprehensive legal regime ever concluded at the
multinational level in the area of intellectual property rights, and
unquestionably the most important development in international intellectual
property law in the last century.
TRIPS Agreement extended IPR to agriculture, mostly due to the insistence of
developed countries, although some form of protection already existed in a
number of developed countries. While the objective of providing protection is
to promote innovation activities in agriculture, such IPR protection could
limit the diffusion of technology by making agriculture more market-dependent
and create more inequities in income and distribution partly as a result of
size disparities. TRIPS has a direct impact on agricultural trade and
development, particularly agricultural biotechnology, and its impact on
agricultural trade is comparatively more important for developing countries
like India as agriculture is still a significant stakeholder in many of these
countries’ GDP, especially in Asian countries. In addition, many of the poor in
Asia depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Biotechnology is the sector
that holds the most potential for advances in agriculture to improve
productivity. It is in this field of technology more than others, that
proprietary right over knowledge is getting increasingly important. However, Biotechnology R&D is mostly
concentrated in the hands of large multinational enterprises in the US, Europe
and Japan. IPRs that are
relevant to the agricultural sector consist mainly of patents, plant breeders’
rights, trademarks, geographical indications and trade secrets. The provision
for Plant Variety Protection (PVP) made under the TRIPs Article 27.3(b), allows
countries to provide such protection either through patent, or an effective sui
generis PVP system or any combination of the two. As such, India was obliged to either introduce patents for new plant
varieties or have an effective sui generis law to protect them. India has opted
for the latter and brought in legislation in 2001 under the Protection of Plant
Varieties and Farmers Rights (PPV & FR) Act, 2001. An important feature of
the Indian Act is that it allows farmers to save, sow and sell seeds even of a
protected variety. Given the importance of agriculture in the Indian economy,
there has been extensive public debate of an intensely political nature, on
certain legislative changes required to implement TRIPS as related to the
agricultural sector. These relate to the institution of plant breeders' rights,
patents for biotechnological inventions and geographical indications. In
addition, the implementation of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to
establish the so-called 'farmers' rights' and the ‘fair and equitable sharing
of benefits’ on commercialization of biological/genetic resources and
traditional knowledge and practices originating from India, has also been
controversial. The paper intends to critically analyze the
application and impact of IPRs on India’s agriculture, with a focus on the
actual working
*Abstarct of the Paper presented recently at the National Conference on “The Evolving Regime in Intellectual
Property Protection”, 2-4 November 2015, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi
