Diffusion of agricultural biotechnology and intellectual property rights: emerging issues in India

Agriculture in developing economies is rural based with a majority of poor people dependent on it. Hence, any new technology that would result in improving the crop yield or reducing the cost will be highly useful. Particularly, biotechnology innovations have several useful applications in agriculture and are useful for developing countries. However, when such new technologies are protected by intellectual property the implications are different. The plant protection system available in India enables the fanner to save, use, sow, resow, exchange, or share the seeds of protected variety, besides offering protection on farmers' variety, extant variety and essentially derived variety. Such a system has scope for adoption of new technology as well as diffusion of the same. Whereas plant protection could boost research in the area of plant biotechnology by both public and private bodies, it could also result in higher prices for seeds, thus naturally excluding the small and marginal farmers from accessing such new technology. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.