Climate Change and Intellectual Property: Regulatory Issues

Abstract

The international IPR regime based upon the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) establishes a global intellectual property (IP) regime, which obliges states to provide legal protection among other things for newly developed plant varieties and patents for inventions. This IP regime facilitates the patenting of stress-tolerant DNA in the 157 member states of the WTO. As a matter of practice, most of this patenting is confined to a relatively small group of life-sciences companies. This is resulting in a market concentration, which has important agricultural policy implications particularly for developing countries. At the same time, plant breeding methods are becoming the subject of patent protection, whereas formerly this was exclusively the subject of laws based on the international convention dealing with plant variety protection (UPOV Convention). The germplasm from which useful biological material is extracted either for patenting or the development of new plant varieties is also the subject of an evolving international regime dealing with authorized access and benefit sharing.

This chapter analyzes these issues, concluding that the impact of IP rights upon food security is becoming as significant as its impact upon access to medicines.