ABSTRACT
The value proposition of participatory plant breeding (PPB) resides in its enabling exploitation of the comparative advantages of two systems of plant breeding: farmers’ and professional breeders’. As PPB implies balancing the interests of different stakeholders, many have advocated effective legal measures for safeguarding these interests, like access to source germplasm for improvement, recognition of collective innovation, and continuous availability of the resultant germplasm for further improvement. Plant variety protection (PVP) intersects with those interests, also in combination with other normative categories. Analysis of sui generis PVP reveals legal tensions between formalization and flexibility in access, collective innovation and individual appropriation for farmers’ varieties, exclusivity and incremental innovation concerning continuous access to germplasm, applicable to PPB contexts. Progress in finding practical solutions has been limited, and there is no evidence of sui generis PVP being applied systematically to sustain PPB. Such lack of impact reveals a fundamental discord between IP on plant variety and PPB. IP categories cannot capture the profound and multi-faceted stakeholder interdependency that characterizes PPB. Sui generis PVP involves complex policy questions of the institutionalization of collaboration, involving cultural, social and political dimensions, where biological or utilitarian IP criteria for recognition of innovation have limited value.
