Agriculture Ipr Effects

The TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects on Intellectual Property Rights) agreement signed by countries at WTO (World Trade Organisation) has made it binding for countries to provide safeguards for IPR i.e. Intellectual Property Rights and ensuring that these are not violated. Possession of IPR by one party grants it exclusive commercial rights and prevents the use by any third party for commercial purposes. IPR are of various types such as patents, copyright, trademark, etc. The kind of IPR applicable to the agricultural sector is patent as copyrights are mostly for artistic work and trademarks are for protecting the logos, slogans of organisations.

Let us examine the extent to which IPR would affect Indian agricultural sector. The biotechnology sector is vital as it has immense potential for R&D in agriculture to improve the agriculture production quantity and quality. However, most of the R&D in this sector is taking place in developed countries such as USA and Japan and so they are gaining proprietary rights over the knowledge acquired through research. This is putting developing countries such as India at a relative disadvantage.

Trademarks are also used to market agricultural products. Main purpose of trademark is to differentiate the product i.e. create a generalised brand name that represent the country of origin or one organisation from another so that the consumer knows what he is buying. Such trademarks prevent other countries from selling their products as those originating in the given region. Example: India has a trademark on Basmati Rice and Darjeeling tea. It won a case against the USA a few years ago regarding use of the name Basmati for rice originating from India. India has been able to reap immense benefit due to this trademark protection that it enjoys as exports of Darjeeling tea and Basmati rice are ever increasing resulting in foreign exchange earnings for India.

Another type of IPR is trade secret protection which protects against misuse by third parties via laws related to unfair competition. In the United States there are separate trade secret laws at the State level. However, the protection ceases once the same trade secret is discovered by another party.

Initiative for protecting the rights of plant breeders' rights were made by the private seed companies in India in the late '80's post implementation of the New Seed Policy (1988). This policy liberalized the import of seeds for a number of crops for joint ventures.

An area of IPRs related to the agriculture sector that has raised considerable controversy in India recently is geographical indications. It became a controversial issue in 1997 when US granted a patent to Ricetec, a US company, on the claim of novel basmati rice lines and grains. India needs more stringent laws to proactively stem the misuse of such geographical names. India ultimately won the case against the USA.

Agricultural