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UC Davis to Host PIPRA

Starting in July 2004, the University of California, Davis will host PIPRA. UC Davis provides an outstanding environment for the start-up of the new organization that will support the development and implementation of PIPRA's activities to facilitate access to agricultural innovations for humanitarian purposes and specialty crops.

Dr. Alan Bennett, currently Executive Director of the Office of Technology Transfer in the Office of the President of the University of California, will serve as the interim Executive Director of PIPRA for a one year period beginning in July 2004. He will be responsible for the organizational development of PIPRA.

UC Davis and Dr. Bennett were selected from an impressive set of proposals and applications submitted to a Request for Proposals and a Position Announcement issued by PIPRA in November 2003. For more information on the selection process, please contact Rex Raimond of Meridian Institute by phone (970-513-8340) or email (rraimond@merid.org).

Purpose

The purpose of PIPRA is to help public sector agricultural research institutions achieve their public missions by ensuring access to intellectual property to develop and distribute improved staple crops and improved specialty crops.

Part of the mission of most public sector research institutions is to contribute to the well being of humankind, and to promote the economies of their region.

Staple crops are important to resource-poor farmers in developing countries who depend on small farm plots and face severe and very fundamental problems, such as poor agricultural soils, drought, plant diseases, and pests. Traditional agriculture has not been able to solve some of these problems. Because of low production, these resource-poor farmers are extremely vulnerable to malnutrition and death.

Specialty crops are important to US agriculture, and state economies depend on the universities in their states to develop new crop varieties with higher productivity, better nutritional value, enhanced resistance to diseases and reduced impact on the environment.

With the introduction of biotechnology in agriculture, researchers have a unique opportunity to contribute to the development of improved staple and specialty crop varieties. However, the development of new crop varieties with biotechnology depends on access to multiple technologies, which are often patented or otherwise protected by intellectual property rights (IPRs). Ownership of these rights is fragmented across many institutions in the public and private sector, which makes it difficult to identify who holds what rights to what technologies, in which countries, and to establish whether or not a new crop variety is at risk of infringing those rights. The current situation creates barriers to commercializing new staple and specialty crop varieties. PIPRA participants believe that if public sector institutions would collaborate in gathering information about and in the use of agricultural IPRs, the collaboration would make it easier for them to fulfill part of their public missions by speeding the creation and commercialization of improved staple and specialty crops.