ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the way in which farmers’ varieties are treated pursuant to India’s Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act and the accompanying Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Rules, 2003.1 Read together, the Act and the Rules represent the first time that farmers’ rights have been explicitly recognized and promoted in national law. The Indian law was heralded by M. S. Swaminathan (1998) as unique in the sense that it is the first time anywhere in the world that the rights of both breeders and farmers have received integrated attention. For Olivier de Schutter (2009), the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, India’s legislative architecture stands alongside the African Model Law for the Protection of the Rights of Local Communities, Farmers and Breeders, and for the Regulation of Access to Biological Resources2 as an act of resistance to deepening proprietary claims in plant genetic resources. The drafting history of India’s law is testimony to struggles to resist intellectual property rights in plants while seeking to push the canon for the rights of marginalized developers and users of plant genetic resources.
