| Policy > External Affairs > International Relations -Patents > International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants |
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| The International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) established an internationally recognized intellectual property system for the protection of new plant varieties. The UPOV Convention encourages and rewards the ingenuity and creativeness of breeders developing new varieties of plants. Anyone who develops a new variety of plant that may be disease resistant, drought resistant, cold tolerant, or simply aesthetically more pleasing is no less an inventor than someone who improves an automobile engine or develops a new medicinal drug. The only difference is that the plant breeder works with living material, rather than inanimate matter.
The process of creating a new plant variety is often long and expensive. Reproducing an existing plant variety, however, can be quick and relatively easy. Thus, an effective system of intellectual property protection needs to reward innovation by permitting inventors to recover their investment and, at the same time, disseminate the knowledge of that innovation for others to improve upon. The UPOV system establishes basic legal principles of protection that reward breeders for their inventiveness by providing exclusive rights to their plant invention, while encouraging the development of new plant varieties.
Under the 1991 UPOV system, the most recently concluded of these, the exclusive rights granted to the inventor (commonly referred to as "breeder's rights") require that another party other than the owner of the breeder's rights receive the breeder's authorization to:
To receive a breeder's right, a breeder must invent a plant variety that is new, distinct, uniform, and stable. Under the UPOV Convention, however, a plant breeder generally does not need breeder authorization to use protected plant varieties for noncommercial or experimental acts or acts done for the purposes of breeding new plant varieties. The UPOV Convention also allows each member nation to restrict the breeder's right in relation to any variety to allow farmers to use part of their harvest for subsequent plantings in their own land. These restrictions, however, must be within reasonable limits and subject to the safeguarding of the legitimate interests of the breeder.
UPOV member states hold biannual meetings of the Council, a permanent body of the convention. Other UPOV bodies include the Consultative Committee, the Administrative and Legal Committee, and the Technical Committee, made up of several Technical Working Parties (TWPs) across several agricultural sectors. The TWPs meet periodically to share and discuss observations and advancements in agricultural sectors, which helps to standardize examination standards among member states. These TWP meetings benefit breeders as well, since more uniform standards lead to greater consistency of application filings in different territories.
As of April 3, 2006, there were 61 member States to the UPOV Convention. UPOV membership is expected to continue to increase in the next several years.
For more information on UPOV, see: http://www.upov.int.
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