ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how bilateral, regional, and trans-regional free trade agreements have proliferated following the entry into force of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. It focuses on ‘hard’ influences, which are understood as formal legal obligations that countries in different Asian subregions have assumed to implement International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) Convention-compliant national laws. The chapter also focuses on the growing tendency to adopt UPOV 1991-based legislation in mainland Southeast Asian countries. It reviews the enacted plant breeders’ rights laws in Cambodia and Laos, and the draft framework that as of May 2019 was still under review in Myanmar. The chapter highlights how Southeast Asian nations that had previously developed independent sui generis intellectual property laws for plants are taking actions to conform to UPOV 1991. Actors from Asian governments have played an instrumental role in promoting the UPOV 1991 model in the region.
