UPOV: The Impact of Plant Variety Protection

Florist shops dazzle with flowers of ever more diverse colors, petal shapes and perfumes. Market displays of fruit and vegetables offer tempting new varieties – bigger, plumper, more flavorsome or appealing to the eye. Food items, such us bread, potatoes, rice, are cheap and of a high quality. These advances all depend on the work of plant breeders.

Today breeders, whether individual enthusiasts, farmers, research institutions or multinational corporations, work to develop new plant varieties. Improved varieties are a necessary and cost-effective means of improving productivity, quality and marketability for farmers and growers. However, breeding new varieties of plants requires a substantial investment of skills, labor, material resources, money and time – it can take more than 15 years to bring a new variety to the market. Intellectual property (IP) protection is therefore afforded to plant breeders as an incentive for the development of new varieties to contribute to sustainable progress in agriculture, horticulture and forestry.

The Geneva-based International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) is an independent intergovernmental organization. Its mission is to provide and promote an effective system of plant variety protection, with the aim of encouraging the development of new varieties of plants for the benefit of society. UPOV administers the UPOV Convention, the purpose of which is to ensure that its members acknowledge the achievements of breeders of new varieties of plants by granting them an intellectual property right on the basis of a set of clearly defined principles. The opportunity to obtain certain exclusive rights in respect of new varieties provides successful plant breeders with a better chance of recovering their costs and accumulating the funds necessary for further investment. Without such rights, there would be nothing to prevent others from reproducing the new variety and selling it on a commercial scale, with no benefit accruing to the breeder.

Report on the impact of plant variety protection

The UPOV Report on the Impact of Plant Variety Protection, published in 2005, concludes that the plant variety protection offered under the UPOV system is effective in its purpose as an incentive for the development of new, improved varieties of benefit...