Trade-related intellectual property: implications for the global seed industry, food sovereignty and farmers’ rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We map the global intellectual property (IP) rights regime for agriculture, and the political and economic structures that support that regime. There is a particular focus on international trade agreements, and the integral role of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). We explore the ways in which this global regime translates into a convergence of agricultural IP laws at the domestic level. This is demonstrated through a review of recent legal developments in jurisdictions such as Australia, Canada and the United States that reflect a tendency towards the expansive reading of IP rights. The chapter tracks plant breeding developments during the twenty-first century, against IP law expansion and the concentration of economic power. The authors argue that there are interrelationships between socio-legal, political economic and technological developments. The emergence of plant-related IP is influenced by powerful economic interests. The establishment of the IP regime has facilitated the growth of those economic interests. While IP rights are justified on the basis that they encourage innovation, in practice, they appear to encourage only particular forms of innovation, while locking out others. Finally, the chapter explores other possibilities for regulation of agricultural inputs that may be more conducive to producer control and innovation. The authors acknowledge developments at the international level that find that a radical transformation of food and farming systems is necessary to meet future global food needs. This transformation will require changes to the ways we regulate food and farming inputs, to reduce corporate power and control, and to promote a more democratic approach to food production and distribution. Some alternative regulatory regimes in places such as India, Malaysia and Thailand are discussed briefly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".