Transcript Intellectual Property and Climate Change

Crop Genetic Resources, IP Rights and
Climate Change: Some Economic Issues
Enrico Bertacchini
Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Torino
[email protected]
Torino October 1th, 2013
Intellectual Property and Climate Change
Why are Crop Genetic Resource
insightful for the debate on IP and
Climate Change?
• Crop Evolution always coping with
environmental changes (Red Queen Race)
• Lessons from compensatory liability regimes
and reconstructed commons experiences to be
applied into the IP and Climate Change debate.
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Agriculture and Climate Change
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From 6.7 to 9.2 billion people by2050
40-50% of theworlds land surface is cultivated or grazed
Biofuels compete with food crops for land
Agriculture accounts for 10-12% of total global GHG emissions
The Green Revolution was accompanied by significantly increased
emissions of CO2, N2O & CH4
• Gains in food production are achieved through areal extension,
increased yield, greater cropping intensity (increased emissions
• How do we move to low emission climate resilient agriculture?
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Economic perspective on reconstructed
commons
• Response to privatization pressure and proliferation of
exclusive rights
• The narrative of the Anticommons Tragedy
• Tragedy or transition?
Are institutions for the transfer of knowledge and
information resources emerging or failing in the new
proprietary context?
• An evolutionary perspective: Reconstructed commons
are just one possible institutional response, but their
success depends on agents’ incentives in joining them
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Plant breeding is a very cumulative
innovation process strongly relying
on the access and exchange of
crop genetic resources.
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INTERNATIONAL TREATY ON
PLANT GENETIC RESOURCES
FOR FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
ITPGRFA
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ITPGRFA
• Designed to overcome the “privatization”
pressure created by TRIPs and CBD for
crop genetic resources.
• Signed in 2001 and come into force in
2004
• Under the aegis of the FAO
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A perfect example of
compensatory liability regime or
reconstructed commons…
Setting up a Multilateral
System of Facilitated Access
and Benefit Sharing
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Article 10.2
Contracting Parties agree to establish a multilateral system and to
share, in a fair and equitable way, the benefits arising from the
utilization of these resources.
Article 11.2
The Multilateral System shall include all plant genetic resources for
food and agriculture listed in Annex I.
Article 11.5
The Multilateral System shall also include material held in the ex situ
collections of the International Agricultural Research Centres of the
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
Article 12.3(g)
Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture accessed under the
Multilateral System and conserved shall continue to be made
available to the Multilateral System by the recipients of those
plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, under the terms of
this Treaty
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Article 13.2 (d)
The Contracting Parties agree that the standard Material Transfer
Agreement shall include a requirement that a recipient who
commercializes a product that is a plant genetic resource for food
and agriculture and that incorporates material accessed from the
Multilateral System, shall pay an equitable share of the benefits
arising from the commercialization of that product,
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…but is it working?
Using some Ostrom’s Design Principles and
economic insights for understanding the
efficacy of the reconstructed commons
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Principle 1. The boundaries of commons
must be clearly defined
• Many crop genetic resources of the multilateral
system are also available outside of it.
Based on a representative sample of 2,655 (7.2%) of
ICRISAT Sorghum accessions, it is conservatively
estimated that at least half of the sorghum varieties
declared in-trust by ICRISAT are being distributed
without an SMTA by the US Department of Agriculture.
Hammond (2011)
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Principle 2. There must be proportional
equivalence between benefits and costs
• Largest benefit is access to pooled germplasm and
related information
• Adopting the new SMTA is unexpectedly increasing
transaction and opportunity costs.
– Burden of the pay-back obligation
– The SMTA does not specify a time limit  obligation more
restrictive than a patent???
• Difficulties in eliciting private parties’ participation
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Principle 5. Sanctions are graduated
• ITPGRFA compliance rules do not include
potentially serious sanctions, other than,
indirectly, loss of country reputation.
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Genebanks unequal distribution and
strategic behaviors by states
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Conclusions
• Probably, without the ITPGRFA the situation
would be worse off in terms of technology and
material transfer related to crop genetic
resources.
• Yet, the implementation of the Multilateral
System points out some key operational
weaknesses.
• Could this be a lesson for Patent reconstructed
commons in green technologies?
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References
• Bertacchini, E. (2009). Contractually constructed research
commons: a critical economic appraisal. In COMMUNIA Conference
2009; Torino, Italy.
• Halewood, M. (2013). What kind of goods are plant genetic
resources for food and agriculture? Towards the identification and
development of a new global commons. International Journal of the
Commons.
• Hammond, E. (2011). How US sorghum seed distributions
undermine the FAO Plant Treatys Multilateral System. Overlap and
use of the CGIAR and US sorghum genebank collections. Studie im
Auftrag des African Center for Biosafty, Erklärung von Bern,
Development Fund.
• López Noriega, I., Halewood, M., Galluzzi, G., Vernooy, R.,
Bertacchini, E., Gauchan, D., & Welch, E. (2013). How Policies
Affect the Use of Plant Genetic Resources: The Experience of the
CGIAR. Resources, 2(3), 231-269.
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Thank You
This presentation is released under a Creative Commons
Attribuzione 3.0 Italia License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/it/)
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