Regulating the Circulation of Intangibles: End Point Royalties, Intellectual Property, and Transformations in Food Production

• In Event: Science, Technology, and the Regulation of Food and Agriculture #2

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between emergent regulatory regimes and changes in the plant breeding sector through attention to a shift in the ways that royalties are collected for intellectual property-protected crop varieties. In the late 1990s, the Australian plant breeding sector adopted a system of end point royalties (EPRs) in the hope that changes in royalty structures could solve a problem that has been a longstanding concern of intellectual property owners: that is, how to track and profit from the circulation of protected objects as they move within the economy. Whereas royalties on biological property have traditionally been collected on the sale of planting material, EPRs entail the collection of royalties on the sale of the harvested material. The rationale for their adoption was that EPRs would generate more money for plant breeding by lowering seed costs and reducing revenue losses from farmer seed saving. While this regulatory shift reworked the movement of protected plant varieties among varietal owners and various end-users, it also raised new concerns about how to trace protected varieties as they circulate along the agricultural supply chain. In this paper I address some of these concerns as they have unfolded within the Australian mango industry. Drawing on interviews and research with various actors in the mango production chain, I show how intellectual property owners have relied upon a variety of social, legal, and technological strategies that have reconfigured food production practices as well as the object of patent and plant variety protection.

Author

• Susannah Chapman, Law School, The University of Queensland