Agriculture Commons^™

Since the late 1980s, technological advances and policy reforms have opened up new opportunities for growth in India’s seed and agricultural biotechnology industries. The impacts of such changes have been significant in India’s cotton sector, but less so for the country’s main cereal crops, where both yield and output growth rates have been relatively stagnant. 

Some public policymakers and corporate decision makers are confident that the private sector will help reverse these trends, arguing that the right combination of new technological solutions and progressive policy reforms will unleash a significant increase in private investment in productivity enhancing products and services. …

With the growth of private investment in developing-country agriculture, new advances in the biological sciences, and rapid integration of developing countries into the global trading system, intellectual property rights (IPRs) have become an important concern for policymakers, corporate decisionmakers, and many other players in the agricultural sector. But there are still unanswered questions about whether emerging and evolving IPR regimes in developing countries will contribute to increasing agricultural productivity and improving food security. This paper attempts to answer some of these questions by tracing the effects of IPRs on private investment in crop genetic improvement and, in turn, on agricultural …