SASKATOON – Some of the world’s top wheat geneticists last week warned that the growth of plant breeders’ rights laws is beginning to restrict researcher access to genetic materials.
“It is a real issue,” said Richard Richards, an Australian wheat geneticist attending an international wheat genetics symposium. “The days when we would be exchanging germplasm very readily have disappeared. There is still some exchange, but it is not as free as it might be.”
Hans Braun, a Turkey-based geneticist for the international wheat and maize research organization CIMMYT, reported a worldwide unease about the impact of property rights on plant breeding.
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In a recent survey of breeders, “more than 80 percent of respondents expressed concern that plant variety protection and plant or gene patents will restrict access to germplasm,” he said in a paper delivered to the conference.
“This may have deleterious consequences for future breeding success since … half of the progress made by breeders in the past can be attributed to germplasm exchange.”
It was a concern noted by scientists from many countries at the conference.
They said the ability to establish a form of patent or commercial protection over the products of research has helped attract increased private investment into plant breeding.
But it also means that increasingly, researchers and companies are less willing to consider germplasm and genetic materials as public property.
George Fedak, an Agriculture Canada researcher based in Ottawa, works with a team which transfers genes from non-wheat plants into wheat.
“We are expanding the gene pool that way,” he said in an interview.
“But these days, with the increase in plant breeders’ rights, everybody is patenting whatever they can get their hands on. Unconsciously, even the public institutions are more reluctant to give out their germplasm because the whole trend now is to exploit it for whatever you can get.”
It was an issue opponents of plant breeders’ rights warned about when the Canadian Parliament debated the issue before legislation was approved a decade ago.
“I think in the next 10 years, this will become even more of an issue as more and more companies own the genes for hybrid wheats,” Australian researcher Rudi Appels said.
