During the last decades, intellectual property rights related to agriculture have become increasingly important, mainly because scientific and technological innovations are everyday more used across the whole food chain, but also because there is growing awareness of the significant role that innovation in plant breeding will play to face some of the major challenges of the twenty-first century, such as food security concerns associated with climate change. This tendency, it seems, is only meant to continue in the future as intellectual property protection linked to agriculture progressively expands. However, whether plant varieties can be considered as a patentable subject matter remains as a threshold issue in which different jurisdictions have maintained divergent views.
Acknowledging this trend, this Master Thesis will perform a comparative analysis of the origins, consolidation, and state of the art of relevant intellectual property rights for agriculture in the European Union and the United States, with focus on the different methods available for the protection of new plant varieties, i.e., utility patents, plant breeder’s rights, and other sui generis statutes. Furthermore, it will discuss the main features of the different approaches followed by these two jurisdictions and the possibilities for convergence between them, in an area that is today characterized by growing reliance of both public and private actors on formal protection by intellectual property rights to foster biological innovation, as well as for interests in reinforcement and international harmonization in these matters.