Rigid patent system stifles agricultural innovation, needs radical change

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(CREDIT: Chris Madden, Biopolitical Times.)

Grist’s Nathanael Johnson muses on the GMO patent question: Should we consider an alternative system to current laws that promote a situation in which agricultural innovation is done primarily by a small handful of companies that have invested heavily in research and development early on? The current system, he says, might be stifling innovation and unresponsive to the needs of its consumers.

Johnson discusses the patent predicament with molecular geneticist Richard Jefferson, who heads up Cambia, a nonprofit that focuses on food security and genetic innovation. “[H]e’s trying to radically transform the entire system of innovation to make it more inclusive and local,” Johnson writes. “The real problem with GMOs is not about science, it’s about business models,” he quotes Jefferson as saying.

The real problem is that the people who need new solutions most, like farmers in developing countries, are isolated in a system that discourages ground-level innovation. Instead, we have a small group of companies in rich countries, with a stranglehold on patents, designing all the solutions to fit their own business models. This system works primarily to bring in money for these companies, to maintain their privilege, and to exclude competition.

Jefferson wants a system that empowers farmers in Africa to invent their own solutions, rather than looking to multinational corporations for fixes, Johnson writes. “The real problem is the inertial forces of big business driving out strategies and models that would create a vigorous, decentralized and democratized innovation capability,” Jefferson says.

Read the full, original story here: “A 16th-century Dutchman can tell us everything we need to know about GMO patents”

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