The History of Farmers' Rights - Fridtjof Nansens Institutt

34 Regine Andersen
M. Geetha Rani explores how community gene banks can be developed
as a means to sustain food security and to put farmers’ rights into practice.
The author points to experiences with community gene banks in
India and Ethiopia, but stresses that the success of community gene banks
is heavily dependent on national legal frameworks.
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Srinivasan, C.S. (2003) ‘Exploring the Feasibility of Farmers’ Rights’,
Development Policy Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 419–447
This article examines the feasibility of farmers’ rights provisions based
on intellectual property rights. It argues that the farmers’ rights legislation
already adopted in some developing countries will involve enormous
operational difficulties, while intellectual property rights based farmers’
rights are unlikely to provide any significant economic returns to farmers
or farming communities. Indeed, they may dilute the incentives for innovation
provided to institutional plant breeders, the author argues, noting
that this may not be a desirable outcome for developing countries.
Conservation projects supported by community gene funds may be a better
way to address concerns regarding the conservation of agrobiodiversity,
but it would be unrealistic to expect that such funds could be financed
through levies on the royalties of plant breeders, the author concludes.
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Borowiak, C. (2004): ‘Farmers’ Rights: Intellectual Property Regimes
and the Struggle over Seeds’, Politics & Society, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp.
511–543.
This article analyses farmers’ rights as a strategy of resistance against the
perceived inequities of intellectual property rights regimes for plant genetic
resources. Borowiak finds that farmers’ rights are a unique form of
rights that may help to transform intellectual property rights systems in
ways better suited for registering and encouraging alternative forms of
innovations, particularly farmers’ innovations. However, thus far it has
been difficult to enact farmers’ rights. The author concludes that by situating
farmers’ rights alongside easily enacted commercial breeders’
rights, the endeavour risks further legitimizing the inequities it is responding
to.
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Brush, Stephen B. (2004): ‘Rights over Genetic Resources and the
Demise of the Biological Commons’, pp. 219–255 in Stephen B.
Brush: Farmers’ Bounty. Locating Crop Diversity in the Contemporary
World (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press).
Stephen B. Brush contrasts the common heritage principle with intellectual
property rights over plants and shows how the genetic commons are
being closed. He highlights how the emerging situation cannot be described
solely as a ‘tragedy of the commons’ (see Brush, 2005 above) but
also as a ‘tragedy of the anti-commons’, where multiple owners have the