ABSTRACT
Comprehensive legislative and regulatory frameworks to govern human uses of plants began to emerge in the decades following industrialisation in Europe and North America. Although the Plant Patent Act was fraught with conceptual tensions and practical limitations, throughout the middle of the twentieth century other countries followed the American precedent. Proponents and opponents of the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants” (UPOV) system agree that the 1991 Act created a “stronger” system of intellectual property for plants in comparison to its predecessors. The evolution of the plant variety as a discrete concept, as embodied in the UPOV Convention, was facilitated and consolidated by advances in genetics and molecular biology that beginning in 1970s and 1980s were increasingly applied to plant breeding practices. In fact, non-UPOV intellectual property laws for plants – typically conceived as plant variety protection rather than plant breeders’ rights – have already been enacted and implemented in several countries, including India, Malaysia, and Thailand.
