Intellectual property rights in Latin American agriculture: Implications of the proprietary logic on genetic resources and sedes

Abstract

International intellectual property regime has gone through a series of stages, which ended up strengthening the institutions and functions at a global level, which prevail today. Particularly, the features that currently prevail were configured in developed countries from the 1980s, with the emergence of the information technology revolution and the closed source model, the reemergence of liberalism and the premise of the self-made man. This completed intellectual property regulations with a series of events, which give shape to a «proprietary» or commercial logic. This logic, which ended up taking shape in the 1990s, with the massive expansion of the Information Age, the Washington Consensus, the marriage between trade and intellectual property with TRIPS, and the expansion of large multinational companies, spreads to Latin American countries, although with some implications. These implications arise from the dissemination of intellectual property regulations on key issues for agriculture in the region, such as seeds and genetic resources, on which difficulties, contradictions and claims have been raised in the adaptation of local regulations to international. This work aims to analyze the position and claims of the main actors involved, with the aim of establishing proposals to establish ways of solution to alleviate the differences in pursuit of a balance between the proposed regulations and the concerns of the region.