What is Plant Variety Right (PVR) ?

Dr Dipak Nath *

Plant Variety Rights are an internationally recognised form of intellectual property used to protect unique plant varieties.

The rights granted to the breeder of a new variety of plant that give the breeder exclusive control over the propagating material (including seed, cuttings, divisions, tissue culture) and harvested material (cut flowers, fruit, foliage) of a new variety for a number of years.

With these rights, the breeder can choose to become the exclusive marketer of the variety, or to license the variety to others. In order to qualify for these exclusive rights, a variety must be new, distinct, uniform, and stable.

The application of PVR is similar in principle to the intellectual property protection offered via copyright on books and music and to patents on a wide range of innovative products including biological material.

The PVR system delivers protection and stimulates further innovation in plant breeding. By ensuring varieties awarded PVR are freely available to others for use in future breeding programmes.

The PVR system allows plant breeders to collect royalties on the production and sale of seed of their protected varieties. Typically, Plant Variety Rights are granted by national offices after examination.

Seed is submitted to the plant variety office, who grow it for one or more seasons, to check that it is distinct, stable, and uniform. If these tests are passed, exclusive rights are granted for a specified period (typically 20/25 years, or 25/30 years for trees and vines). Annual renewal fees are required to maintain the rights.

To qualify for Plant Variety Rights, a new variety must undergo official tests to determine whether it is Distinct, Uniform and Stable (DUS). For most crop species, these independent tests take two years. A variety must be clearly distinguishable from any other existing variety by one or more characteristics.

Individual plants of the same variety must be sufficiently uniform in a range of key characteristics. A plant variety is considered to be stable if it reproduces true to type from one generation to the next.

For each new variety, these DUS tests are undertaken and the results considered by independent experts to determine whether all the necessary requirements for Plant Variety Rights have been met. Plant Variety Rights are granted for a period of 25 years for all species except trees, vines and potatoes, which have a period of 30 years.

Plant variety protection provides legal protection of a plant variety to a breeder in the form of Plant Breeder’s Rights (PBRs). PBRs are intellectual property rights that provide exclusive rights to a breeder of the registered variety.

In India, the Plant Variety Protection And Farmers Rights (PPVFR) Act, 2001 aims to provide for the establishment of an effective system for protection of plant varieties and the rights of plant breeders and farmers.

A certificate of registration for a variety issued under this Act confers an exclusive right on the breeder or his successor, his agent or licensee, to produce, sell, market, distribute, import or export the variety. Application for registration of plant varieties can be made in the office of Registrar, PPV & FRA, New Delhi.

The main aim of this Act is to establish an effective system for the protection of plant varieties and, the rights of the breeders and to encourage the development of new varieties of plants. Any variety that fulfils the DUS criteria and that is “new” (in the market) is eligible for this kind of protection, and there is no need to demonstrate an inventive step or industrial application, as required under a patent regime.

A DUS examination involves growing the candidate variety together with the most similar varieties of common knowledge, usually for at least two seasons, and recording a comprehensive set of morphological (and in some cases agronomic) descriptors. Plant varieties present in wilderness cannot be registered, under PPV&FR Authority.

However, any traditionally cultivated plant variety which has undergone the process of domestication / improvement through human interventions can be registered and protected subjected to fulfilment of the eligible criteria.