China
January 26, 2011
Source: Farmers’ Daily
The survey report recently released by China Seed Industry Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Alliance showed that China’s seed industry had been increasingly aware of IPR, which advocated respect for knowledge, credit and laws, and the numbers of approved applications for plant variety rights (PVR) and patents from the seed industry had been rising sharply. By the end of 2010, the PVR applications had amounted to 7,761, of which 7,268 were from domestic applicants; and those from domestic seed companies had increased at big margin, accounting for 32 percent of the total domestic applications. The approved PVR applications numbered 3,473, of which 3,409 were from domestic applicants. According to the statistics of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), the annual total of PVR applications in China has remained at the fourth place among the UPOV members since 2004.
By the end of 2010, China had accepted a total of 5,015 patent applications related to breeding, of which 3,588 were from domestic applicants and 347 were from domestic seed companies, taking up 9.7 percent of all the domestic applications; and altogether there had been 1,883 approved applications and 1,108 valid patents, including 1,480 approved domestic applications and 816 valid domestic patents, which accounted for 55.1 percent of the total approved domestic applications.
The Ministry of Agriculture has carried out trials on administration of PVR and the seed industry based on laws and regulations in 22 provinces and municipalities in order to strengthen the supervision for seed production bases, eliminate infringements and counterfeits from the source and enhance the PVR protection for key varieties. By 2008, the agricultural administrative agencies across the country had accepted altogether 1,123 PVR cases and this number has dropped dramatically since 2009.
Meanwhile, seed companies have also taken the initiative to protect their legal rights and interests through administrative and legal means or their own efforts, which has achieved good results.
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