ABSTRACT
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) provide a mechanism for incentivizing and rewarding innovative activity by granting creators and innovators exclusive rights to enjoy the benefits of their innovation and decide how it is used, for a limited period of time. The intellectual property (IP) system aims to strike a balance between the private rights of innovators to be recognized and rewarded for their innovative behaviour, and the broader rights of society to get access to and benefit from the products of innovation. Much debate centres on the extent to which this balance is in fact being achieved. In particular, there is concern that the system favours technology producers in the developed world to the detriment of developing countries. In most sectors of the biotechnology industry, strong IP protection is viewed as crucial to enable recoupment of the large investments that are required to bring new products to market, and this is certainly true in the area of agricultural biotechnology. This means that much of the new technology is proprietary, held by large organizations in both the public and private sectors. As a result, concerns have been raised about the impact of this trend on efforts to build a bioeconomy in developing countries.
