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over the last few decades has been the emergence of IPR regimes (see 2.3.1) that so far do not adequately protect or recognize individual farmers' and communities' ongoing and historic contributions to knowledge creation and technology development or their rights to the products and germplasm created and sustained under their management. Even so, innovative ways forward can be found: formal breeders and commercial organizations in the globally important Dutch potato industry cooperate with Dutch potato hobby specialists in breeding and varietal selection; farmers negotiate formal contracts which give them recognition and reward for their intellectual contribution in all varieties brought to market.

     The inequities in access and benefit sharing under the various protocols and conventions negotiated at international levels have given rise to a strong civil society response (2.2.1; 2.2.3) reflected in the Declaration on Indigenous Peoples' rights to genetic resources and IK-a collective statement on an international regime on access and benefit sharing issued by the indigenous peoples and organizations meeting at the Sixth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, in New York on 14-25 May, 2007 (ICPB-Net Indigenous Peoples' Council on Biocolonialism, http://lists.ipcb.org/listinfo.cgi/ipcb-net-ipcb.org). Recent experience with the development of enforceable rights for collective innovations (Salazar et al., 2007) offers ground for evolution of currently dominant IPRs. There are new concerns that clean development mechanisms (CDMs), international payments for environmental services or payments for avoided deforestation and/or degradation will override the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.

     The final model considered here is by far the most dominant model of knowledge processes associated with commercial innovation in the private sector, the chain-linked model (Kline and Rosenberg, 1986). A distinctive feature is the effort made throughout every stage of product development to obtain feedback from markets and end users (Blokker et al., 1990); it is demand-driven rather than supply-push. It has given significant impulse to the development of market economies wherever the enabling conditions exist but has had little to offer where science organizations have remained weak and consumer markets are unable to articulate monetary demand-as in fact has been the case for much of the period among the rural and urban poor and especially among women and other marginalized peoples.

     The recent emphasis among policy makers on developing market-oriented and market-led opportunities along entire value chains for small-scale producers and other rural people (DFID 2002, 2005; NEPAD, 2002; IAC, 2004; FAO, 2005c; UN Millennium Project, 2005; World Bank, 2005c; OECD, 2006a) has created wider interest in the model as a platform where diverse actors in public-private partnerships can find each other and organize their respective roles. Today it is being extended with varying energy mainly in the "new consumer economies" i.e., countries with populations over 20 million (Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela). However, evidence of the extent to which small-scale producers can participate effectively, if at all, in these arrangements in the absence of

 

strong producers' organizations (Reardon et al., 2003) and of the impact on knowledge management (Spielman and Grebner, 2004; Glasbergen et al., 2007) has shown that the interests of private research and public-private partners may diverge from the combined public interest goals of equity, sustainability and productivity. Holding on to benefits may be difficult for employees and national research systems in globalizing markets as the recent rapid switch of a number of commercial cut flower operations from Kenya to Ethiopia illustrates, while global retailers' ability to determine price, quality, delivery and indirectly also labor conditions for suppliers and producers in the chain means that the burdens of competition may be transferred to those least able to sustain them (Harilal et al., 2006).

2.1.2.3 New challenges and opportunities

Transfer of technology has become important in recent years as a means of shifting technological opportunity and knowledge among private commercial actors located in different parts of the world and through science networks that stretch across geographic boundaries. It continues to guide practice as a means of promoting farm level change in what are still large public sector systems in countries such as China (Samanta and Arora, 1997). However, increasingly ToT has to find its place in an organizationally fragmented and complex context that emphasizes demand-driven rather than supply-push arrangements (Rivera, 1996; Leeuwis and van den Ban, 2004; Ekwamu and Brown, 2005). The shift toward contracting or other forms of privatization of research, extension and advisory services in an increasing number of countries (Rivera and Gustafson, 1991; Byerlee and Echevveria, 2002; Rivera and Zijp, 2002; van den Ban and Samantha, 2006) is an effort to reorganize the division of power among different players in AKST. In the process the central state is losing much of its ability to direct technological choice and the organization of knowledge processes. The effects and the desirability in different contexts of altering the balance between public and private arrangements remain under debate as the expanding diversity of financing and organizational arrangements has not yet been fully assessed (Allegri, 2002; Heemskerk and Wennink, 2005; Pardey et al., 2006a).

     Decentralization and devolution of development-related governance powers from central to more local levels in an increasing number of developing countries has opened the space for many more instances of FPR&E in an increasingly diverse array of partnerships that are not easy to classify and demand new frames of understanding (Dorward et al., 1998; AJEA, 2000). At the same time, the push for exportoriented agriculture and in an increasing number of countries, the strong growth in domestic consumer demand has opened the space for the chain-linked model to be expressed more widely and with deeper penetration into small-scale farming communities. In addition, the "core estate-without- growers" model has taken on new life as international food processors and retailers contract organized producer associations to produce to specification. The partnership between IFAD and the Kenya Tea Development Authority to introduce sustainable production techniques to small-scale outgrowers by means of Field Schools is a strong example of how changing values in consuming countries can have