Six years ago, when the country's agricultural authorities sowed the seed of "protection of new varieties of plants" by enforcing a statute, they had no idea how much they were going to reap.

The ground for the "seed" was not fertile.

Before the Regulations on the Protection of New Varieties of Plants took effect in 1999, breeders had often found high-grade crop seeds they cultivated over years of painstaking work were either copied or propagated for commercial purposes by others without their permission.

As a result, the breeders lost the incentive to continue their research and development and once superior varieties of seed were quickly degraded to average quality.

Growing application

Regulations sought, in part, to stem this.

In line with international practice, the Chinese regulations guarantee breeders exclusive rights over their protected variety, and unless otherwise authorized, prohibit others from producing or selling for commercial purposes any propagating material of the protected variety.

Applications by breeders began to trickle in after the act came into force in April 1999.

In China, the Ministry of Agriculture and the State Forestry Administration each established an office to deal with examination and approval of rights protection application in respect of agricultural and forest plants.

In that first year, the Office for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants under the Ministry of Agriculture received 115 IPR applications relating to crop breeding, said Lin Xiangming, an official with the body.

Given the size of China's agricultural sector, that figure was negligible. But today, as the regulations have taken hold and awareness has grown, both on the ground as well as in the minds of entrepreneurs, China is emerging as a world leader in the field and has one of the largest number of applications for rights protection by growers.

"By January 1, plant breeders had filed 2,046 applications for intellectual property protection," said Lin.

The figure included 32 lodged by companies from Japan, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and the United States.

The annual number of applications in China may well exceed 1,000 in three years, ranking it number one among members of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), he said.

China joined the Geneva-based intergovernmental organization the same year it introduced its new plant variety protection act.

The ever-increasing influx of applications indicates that the country's efforts to highlight intellectual property protection of new varieties of plants have paid off.

Such endeavours are crucial to the expansion of agriculture, said Lin.

The new plant variety protection regime, designed to encourage breeders to develop new varieties of plants, has lent strong impetus to the growth of crop breeding and seeding industries.

"It is safe to conclude that among all the intellectual property rights in China, protection of those in relation to new plant varieties is perhaps blessed with the most optimal legal and policy support," he said.

As a member of the UPOV, China has put in place legal remedies for the effective enforcement of breeders' rights.

In 2000, the Supreme People's Court released explanations on issues regarding resolution of disputes on rights for new varieties of plants, to facilitate the handling of such cases by people's courts at various levels.

The Ministry of Agriculture, for its part, has worked out specific measures to ensure State regulations on the protection of new plant varieties can be implemented to the letter, said Lin.

Since 1999, the ministry has published five batches of national lists of protected plant varieties to help breeders seeking to apply.

The ministry has also helped set up law enforcement pilot regions in 10 agricultural production areas, including the provinces of Sichuan, Hunan and Shandong, he said.

Zhao Xueqian, vice-director of Sichuan provincial agricultural commission, said his province launched China's first association for the protection of new varieties of plants in March 2003. It now encompasses 42 institutions and 130 individual breeders.

Chen Dequan, a plant protection expert with the commission, said he was included on a jury in a local court trying a case last June in which a breeder - Sichuan Agricultural University - claimed its rights over a new rice strain had been violated.

The Sichuan court ruled in favour of the holder of the breeder's right, said Chen.

Nationwide, local courts have so far addressed at least 100 cases in which such rights were breached, ministry sources reveal.

Multiple benefits

The beneficiaries of the protection system have been threefold.

Breeders reap economic returns through transferring their plant variety rights or authorization, while seed companies expand their market share by supplying authorized, branded seeds to farmers, who in turn increase production by growing new varieties of plants, said Lin.

Thanks to the protection regulations, Huang Xilin, an executive of Beijing Origin Seed Technology Inc, said his company had snowballed from a small firm into a seed supplier with seven subsidiaries in provinces including Henan, Sichuan and Shandong.

The company sells six new varieties of seeds, whose IPRs it owns, including hybrid corn seeds Yuyi 22 and Lin'ao 1, which have become popular in China, and contributes 95 per cent of the company's turnover.

"The economic returns have encouraged the firm to sink more funds into research and development of new varieties of plants," said Huang.

Origin has invested 30 million yuan (US$3.61 million) in establishing breeding bases in Beijing, Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province and Hainan Province.

By the end of last year, the new plant varieties protection office of the Ministry of Agriculture had issued title to 503 breeders, the latest ministry statistics show.

Such protected varieties, including strains of rice, corn, wheat and vegetable, have been accumulatively planted in 42.7 million hectares of farmland over the past few years, the ministry estimates.

The financial benefits the new varieties of crops have brought holders of breeder's rights are estimated to have reached 1.97 billion yuan (US$237 million), and have increased grain production by 56.32 billion kilograms.

A survey of 500 new varieties of plants already granted breeder's rights, or in the process of applying for such, found only 17 per cent of the investment for research and development came from government at various levels, while the rest was funded by business and individuals.

This has reversed the trend of the past when most funding came from the government, said Lin.

Another shift is that individuals and enterprises rather than scientific institutions are filing more and more IPRs in respect of plant breeding.

"In 1999, one-fifth of the country's total applicants were individual breeders or companies," said Lin. "In 2003, that ratio jumped to one-third and last year it surpassed 40 per cent."

With the country's legal and policy environment for protecting intellectual property rights continuing to improve, the ratio will continue to surge in the years ahead, he says.

However, the country has yet to improve testing technology to support its examination of applicants' compliance with the conditions for new plant varieties, said Lin.

(China Daily 01/24/2005 page5)