implemented. To be effective, a policy should also facilitate change, through a process of experimentation, reflection and learning so that it develops the capacity of the various stakeholders to identify bottlenecks, experiment with alternative ways of working and evaluate performance. The actors in the policy system thereby learn what needs to be changed or modified and how to develop better policies. Thirdly, implementation of good policies and programs requires collaboration among a large number of organizations. This is especially so since most of the innovations needed in agriculture today have collective dimensions; i.e., they require new forms of interaction, organization and agreement between multiple actors (Leeuwis and van den Ban, 2004).
This essentially means that all organizations involved in the agricultural innovation system need to operate within a policy framework and have the capacity to produce and integrate new knowledge and apply it in their specific contexts to deal with challenges. For instance, the agenda and constituency of extension will need to expand beyond its current mandate of technology dissemination to help producers cope with new challenges and expand its client base to include NGOs, producer associations, rural entrepreneurs, agricultural labor and women. For extension to play these roles, it will need to develop new capacities, including technological (new knowledge and skills) and institutional (new patterns of collaboration, new habits and practices) ones.
5.7 IPR
Governments extend legal measures to protect intellectual rights over AKST to protect the rights of innovators from misappropriation and reward and encourage innovations. Intellectual rights protection for AKST in the ESAP region generally falls under intellectual property rights (IPR) systems such as patents and the more plant-specific plant variety protection. There is emerging consensus in international discussions that the current IPR regime may only be appropriate for innovations generated by formal institutions, particularly involving conventional AKST and emerging frontiers in AKST and is not an appropriate system to protect traditional and informal knowledge systems. There are ongoing efforts to address this issue, such as the multilateral platforms of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to develop an appropriate system of intellectual rights protection over these knowledge systems (CIPR, 2002; Tauli-Corpuz, 2003; Khor, 2004).
Some governments in the ESAP have adopted policies and laws that specifically provide for protection of traditional knowledge and resources. Thailand enacted its Farmers Rights and Plant Variety Protection Law in 2000, providing protection to farmers' traditional varieties through registration under the name of the local community and mandating benefit-sharing on new varieties derived from endemic varieties. India has a Farmers' Rights and Plant Breeders' Rights Law (1999) which exempts farmers' varieties from plant breeders' rights protection and allows farmers to use, exchange and even sell protected varieties. Malaysia's Plant Variety Protection Act was passed in 2004 and provides for separate category and criteria for farmers' varieties.
There is contentious debate on whether or not the IPR regime promotes innovations. The UK Commission on Intel- |
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lectual Property Rights (CIPR), comprised of international IPR experts who looked into the role and impacts of the IPR on developing countries, concluded that patents in particular are not considered important determinants of innovation even in developed countries, except in such sectors as phar-maceuticals (CIPR, 2002). There are concerns among international and national public research institutions that the stringent application of IPR has impeded free exchange and flow of germplasm needed for research and development efforts. This has resulted in calls to review the appropriateness of the current IPR systems in protecting innovations while at the same time ensuring continuing innovation and exchange of germplasm. ESAP governments need to strike a balance between intellectual protection over innovations and ensuring that innovations and genetic materials are continuously available for further research and development for public interest.
Over the years, concerns have been raised by various sectors in the region about the threats posed by the current IPR regime in misappropriating traditional knowledge and resources through biopiracy. Controversial regional biopiracy cases include several from India: the neem tree, whose insecticidal properties have been patented by W.R. Grace; a traditional chickpea variety covered by plant breeders' rights in Australia; and turmeric, patented in the US for post-surgical wound-healing. Thailand's plau noi has been patented by a Japanese company. The Indian government won a petition for the revocation of the turmeric patent in the US in 1999 and Indian civil society organizations won a petition for the revocation of the W.R. Grace patents on the neem tree in 2005. Such biopiracy issues have been brought to the attention of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which serves as the major multilateral forum to address issues of access to biological and genetic resources. The CBD has been discussing mechanisms for the regulation of access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing arising from the commercial utilization of these resources.
In compliance with their commitment to the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), some countries in the ESAP have already adopted or formulated their own patent laws or sui generis systems for plants and plant varieties. However, most of these countries still lack the capacity to address the complex issues surrounding this agreement (Hossain, 2004). As of 2006, only a few countries in the ESAP had actually adopted sui generis legislations for the protection of plant varieties (PVP) as mandated in TRIPS 27.3(b). There are debates that surround this system of plant variety protection, with some authors claiming that the sui generis PVP system is a form of IPR (Evenson, 2005) while others assert that it is not a form of IPR but actually a model to balance the monopolistic tendencies of IPR regimes (Khor, 2004). The most notable sui generis plant variety protection laws were enacted by India (1999), Thailand (2000), Pakistan (2002) and Malaysia (2004). While the Philippines (2002) and Indonesia (2002) have also adopted their own PVP laws which they claim as sui generis, their laws may be more akin to the conventional plant breeders' rights model promoted by the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). There are systems of intellectual rights protection that are evolving outside of the conventional IPR regimes and even the sui |