the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture

Photograph of a Filipino farmer by Sonny Leon (sonnyleon@hotmail.com) of Quezon City, Philippines

PIPRA is an non-profit initiative striving to make it easy for developing countries to access new agricultural technologies.

If you're new to PIPRA, consider reading our first publication in Science Magazine and the browsing through our IP database.

PIPRA's Purpose

PIPRA serves a number of purposes, the most important of which is helping to improve agriculture in emerging economies by decreasing intellectual property barriers and increasing technology transfer. We also work with farmers and scientists in mature economies who are growing specialty crops. Finally, PIPRA helps our member institutions achieve their humanitarian mandates by making sure their technological innovations get to those who need it most.

PIPRA's core activities

PIPRA helps innovators in developing countries access new agricultural technologies. We do this by helping innovators create licensing and material transfer agreements with our members. We also do a lot of outreach to teach about international intellectual property law and development. PIPRA's core activities include the following:

  • IP policy analysis
  • IP landscape analysis on particular technologies
  • Biotechnology resources, e.g. the pPIPRA vector
  • Research consortia support, e.g. Pierce's Disease
  • IP management workshops at public institutions
  • Regional IP Resources, mainly in Latin America and Southeast Asia
  • IP handbook

Background and history

Agricultural Research in the U.S.

Agricultural research in the U.S. is greatly influenced by our system of Land Grant Colleges, which were created in the late 1800's to advance teaching and research in agriculture and other economically important fields. At that time, over 50% of the U.S. population lived on farms, and 60% of the labor force was employed in agriculture. The Land Grant system promotes a three-pronged mission of teaching, research and extension services. Together, these components provide an important link between the colleges and society's needs.

Traditionally, discoveries in public research institutions and agricultural universities were treated as public goods and flowed freely to farmers and businesses, often through university extension services. This system supported generations of improvements to crop germplasm. Companies adopted and improved upon discoveries from public sector institutions and turned them into crop varieties for commercial markets. This helped develop a robust seed industry in developed countries and to significantly increase food production in developing countries.

Changes in Policy and Science

Over the past two decades this system changed fundamentally. These changes were driven by many factors including the following: the biotechnology revolution, reduced public funding for agricultural research, and a concern that innovations created by government-sponsored research were under-commercialized.

These factors drove the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which was designed to encourage universities to license their inventions to the private sector, thereby encouraging commercial use. In addition, many universities hoped these licensing agreements would help make up the funding shortfall from the Federal and state governments. Bayh-Dole was followed immediately by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that increased the ability of researchers to protect new crop varieties using intellectual property such as patents.

The Private Sector’s Response to Change

The increased IP protection afforded crops resulted in a dramatic increase in patenting activity. Today, technology ownership is frequently fragmented between many owners. This forces companies to cross-license technologies and can frequently lead to mergers and acquisitions as a means to accumulate portfolios of agricultural IP, such as patents, and material, such as germplasm. There are only a small number of large multi-national firms that control a large proportion of cutting edge agricultural IP. A key goal of this centralization is to enhance a company's freedom to operate for producing new crop varieties.

Impact on the Public Sector

The end result of these policy changes and the response of the private sectors is a significant and increasing difficulty of public sector researchers to access technologies to fulfill their "extension" missions. Even though pubic sector organizations are prolific inventors, the ownership of complementary technologies (which may be required for commercialization) is highly fragmented and scattered across many institutions and technology categories. Information about what technologies exist and where the rights are held is often difficult to find. Moreover, many of the best technologies have been licensed to companies in the private sector, sometimes under terms that are confidential and that give exclusive rights to the company.

Since applied research and crop improvement is a cumulative process based on pre-existing plant material, each incremental improvement that involves a new technology now brings with it a number of IP and germplasm constraints, which accumulate in the plant material.

Golden Rice: a widely publicized example of the public sector’s IP problems in agricultural biotechnology

The experience in the development of rice enhanced with beta carotene, or GoldenRice, is one example of the consequences of complex IP ownership in agricultural biotechnology. The beta carotene in GoldenRice provides dietary vitamin A when consumed. This promises large health benefits to millions of poor children in developing countries, where vitamin-A deficiency causes 500,000 cases of blindness each year, and is a contributing factor in over 2 million premature deaths. However, after GoldenRice was developed, researchers realized that many of the techniques used by the inventors of GoldenRice were patented in some countries, and that a number of biological materials had been used either informally or under legal agreements that restricted further dissemination. In all, there were at least 70 patents potentially involved, issued in a variety of countries, and at least six material transfer agreements (MTAs). Although these issues haven now been largely resolved through the cooperation of the private and public sector technology owners, much time and effort was expended to overcome these barriers.

Public Sector Collaboration Can Bring Changes

The public sector remains an important source of innovation in agricultural research all over the world. To some extent a division of innovative labor has emerged, with the private sector providing innovation for large acreage commercial crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton, and the public sector retaining its traditional role of providing innovation for smaller market specialty crops and supporting humanitarian efforts to improve subsistence staple crops in countries wrought by food insecurity.

By collaborating with one another through PIPRA, public sector institutions have an opportunity to make it easier to use current and future inventions for the development and commercialization of improved staple and specialty crops. PIPRA and its member institutions are engaged in a number of activities to achieve this goal. Among these are the development of best practices in IP management such as systematically retaining rights to use technologies for research and development of subsistence and specialty crops when issuing commercial licenses. PIPRA member institutions are systematically making their current and future technologies and their availability known to each other and to the world. PIPRA member institutions and the PIPRA staff are developing strategies that allow them to continue their work with the private sector to develop opportunities for commercialization of new technologies, while at the same time realizing the broad public benefits that can be realized from the dissemination and adoption of new innovations.

Members

Today more than 40 institutions from more than 12 countries around the world are members of PIPRA. Your institution can become part of this community and help to navigate intellectual property for agricultural innovation in a more fair and productive manner.

Benefits of being a member

Many of PIPRA’s institutional members have active independent technology transfer programs.  PIPRA acts as a resource for these programs, and for agricultural scientists that work in the public sector, to facilitate the transfer and adoption of their technologies by resource poor farmers. PIPRA also provides IP analytical services, access to a public sector patent information clearinghouse, resources for professional best practices in IP management, and connections to an international community.

Membership in PIPRA does not prescribe particular IP management practices nor does it preclude a research institution from securing external IP management services. In addition, a number of collaborators, including law firms, academic programs, IP management organizations, and policy think-tanks regularly work with PIPRA and its member institutions. These collaborators provide world class services to a diverse client base and view PIPRA’s services and mission to be complementary to their own. 

PIPRA’s services and structure are intended to support the missions of its members and it collaborators.  Where members have active technology transfer offices or offer IP management services, PIPRA supports them through the provision of complementary, not duplicative, services. PIPRA seeks to engage them in global intellectual property issues important to innovations in agriculture.

Who can be a member

PIPRA membership is open to any university, public agency, or non-profit research institution actively engaged in agricultural research. Member institutions must agree to the terms laid out in the PIPRA Memorandum of Understanding.

There is no PIPRA membership fee. Membership does not prescribe particular IP management practices. Nor does it preclude a research institution from securing external IP management services. PIPRA members retain full ownership and responsibility for their institution’s intellectual property. PIPRA simply becomes a resource to which they can turn.

How to become a member

It is easy to become a PIPRA member. Simply, an authorized official of your institution needs to sign the PIPRA Memorandum of Understanding and return it to PIPRA.

For more information, a Prospective Member Information Pack is available upon request.

In addition, someone from PIPRA’s professional staff or the PIPRA Executive Committee would be happy to talk with you about membership in the organization. Depending upon travel schedules, it may even be possible for one of us to visit your institution, provide a seminar, and meet with the relevant constituencies who want to learn more.

List of current members

AsiaPacific

Europe &Africa

theAmericas

Affiliates

Academic & non-profit

Center for Intellectual Property Studies (CIP)- Göteborg University and Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden

Franklin Pierce Law Center, New Hampshire

Washington University School of Law, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), Nairobi, Kenya

Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL), Norwich, United Kingdom

USAID Farmer-to-Farmer Program-Latin America, Washington, DC

Legal

Foley Hoag, LLP

Townsend and Townsend and Crew, LLP

Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors (PIIPA)

IP information services

GenomeQuest

M-CAM

PIPRA's Directors

Alan B Bennett, Executive Director
Dr. Bennett’s research interests are in the developmental control of cell wall assembly and disassembly, carbohydrate metabolism and fruit development. Bennett has published over 120 research papers in leading scientific journals and is a regular speaker at Universities, international symposia and private companies. He also holds several utility patents related to crop quality traits and consults widely on scientific and intellectual property issues in agricultural biotechnology. Bennett earned a B.Sc. degree at the University of California Davis in 1977 and Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1983, both in the field of plant biology. Upon completing postdoctoral research at Cornell, he returned to UC Davis to teach and conduct research in plant molecular biology. Bennett also held a visiting appointment at the Ecole Nationale Superieure Agronomique d' Toulouse in 1997 and belongs to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Plant Biology, the Association of University Technology Managers and the Licensing Executives Society. Dr. Bennett is the executive director of the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, PIPRA, and Associate Vice Chancellor at the Office of Research and Technology and Industry Alliances at University of California Davis.

Sara Boettiger, Director, Strategic Planning and Development
Sara Boettiger is an agricultural economist with a background in intellectual property (IP) law. She works as Director of Strategic Planning and Development at PIPRA (The Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, www.pipra.org) and is a consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She publishes in the field of IP law and policy and serves on the Board of Trustees of CIMMYT (The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre) and on the Board of Directors for the Institute of Forest Biotechnology.

Her professional interests are focused on the design and implementation of practical services to support innovation and improve livelihoods in developing countries. Her research interests are in the law and economics of: IP rights and developing countries; collaborative innovation systems; open source in copyright and patents; university technology transfer systems; and the strategic use of all forms of intellectual property to serve the interests of developing countries.

Sara holds a B.A., University of Arizona; M.S., University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley Sara can be reached at sara@pipra.org.

Cecilia Chi-Ham, Director Biotechnology Resources
Dr. Cecilia Chi-Ham, a native of Honduras, Central America, earned a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Ozarks, USA and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA. In 2004, upon completing postdoctoral work at Michigan State University in the field of plant biology, Dr. Chi-Ham joined PIPRA. As a plant biologist interested in facilitating agricultural innovations, particularly in developing countries, Dr. Chi-Ham leads PIPRA’s Biotechnology Resources Program. The Biotechnology Resources program’s activities include developing research tools with maximum freedom-to-operate to support a wide array of agricultural applications for humanitarian and commercial purposes, facilitating technology transfer, building new partnerships and research collaborations, and providing legal information on biotechnology tools. The program’s multi-disciplinary activities straddle the delicate junction between science, legal, business development, and regulatory affairs necessary for the research and development of new agricultural innovations in developed and developing countries. Cecilia can be reached at clchiham@ucdavis.edu.

Kyle Jensen, Director Information and Analysis
Kyle is the Director of Information and Analysis at PIPRA and a research affiliate at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. He is also a co–founder of Agrivida Inc., an agricultural biotechnology company creating novel corn varieties for producing fuel ethanol. Kyle served as Vice President of Agrivida from 2002-2006. He is published widely in the field of biotechnology including publications in both Nature and Science. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both in chemical engineering.

Executive committee

PIPRA is governed by an Executive Committee made up of individuals nominated and elected from amongst its member institutions.

Gerard Barry
Golden Rice Network Coordinator
International Rice Research Institute, Philippines

John Byatt
Associate Director, Life Sciences
University of Florida

Robert Goodman
Dean of Cook College
Agriculture and Natural Resources
Rutgers University

Keith Jones
Director
Intellectual Property Administration
Washington State University

Charles Kitima
Vice Chancellor
St Augustine Universtiy of Tanzania

Alan McHughen
Biotechnology Specialist
University of California, Riverside

Irvin Mettler
Senior Licensing Officer
Office of Technology Licensing
University of California, Berkeley

Contents of this page

Valid XHTML.