The Intellectual Property–Regulatory Complex
Overcoming Barriers to Innovation in Agricultural Genomics
The combination of intellectual property and biosafety regimes may be preventing scientific solutions to global agricultural problems from reaching the people who need them – what can be done to overcome these barriers?
Description
Advances in agricultural genomics could help address pressing global issues such as world hunger. However, overlapping and inconsistent intellectual property and biosafety regimes – collectively referred to as the “Intellectual Property–Regulatory Complex” – create significant, and often conflicting, barriers to developing and commercializing new agricultural biotechnology. The authors of this collection explore how this Complex impacts innovation in ways that cannot be appreciated when individual regimes are examined in isolation. They then propose solutions that would meet the objectives of the current intellectual property and biosafety regimes while enabling innovation in the field of agricultural genomics.