South Centre Report, 16 January 2024
Identifying Legal Challenges for Farmers’ Innovation
By Saurav Ghimire
On 9 October 2023, an expert workshop on “Identifying Legal Challenges for Farmers’ Innovation” was organised at the Centre for Private and Economic Law, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in collaboration with the South Centre and Université Catholique de Louvain. The hybrid event gathered experts to discuss the challenges for farmers’ innovation, particularly those emerging from regulatory regimes. The workshop brainstormed policy and regulatory hindrances to farmers’ involvement in plant breeding, namely, in access to breeding materials, access to the market and reward/protection for the innovation.
The expert workshop was organised as a part of a joint research project, “Farmers as Plant Breeders: Legal Mechanisms to Foster Farmers’ Innovation”, led by Prof. Christine Frison (Université Catholique de Louvain), Prof. Kim Van der Borght (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Prof. Carlos Correa (South Centre). The research project is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
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Identifying Legal Challenges for Farmers’ Innovation
This article was tagged: Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS), Breeders, Breeders' Rights, Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Farmers, Farmers' Rights, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Genetic Resources, Human Rights, Innovation, Intellectual Property, Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), Patent, Peasants, Plant Protection, Plant Variety, Plant Variety Protection (PVP), Plant Variety Protection Laws, Plants, Right to Seeds, Rights of Peasants, Seeds, Traditional Knowledge, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas
