The politics of agricultural intellectual property protection: the strange story of Ghana's PVP legislation

Ossom-Kabu, Joseph Tettey (2024) The politics of agricultural intellectual property protection: the strange story of Ghana's PVP legislation. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The Republic of Ghana has come a long way with its attempts to protect plant breeders' rights, as required by the UPOV-91 Convention and the TRIPS Agreement. The Ghanaian government finally passed the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) Act of 2020 after other attempts in previous years were unsuccessful. The Plant Breeders’ Bill of 2013 was the country’s first attempt at protecting breeders’ rights; however, the bill generated a huge controversy and a series of protests in the country, as many stakeholders were not in favour of its provisions. Consequently, the bill was suspended from parliament for further consultations to be made, and there it remained until the Plant Variety Protection Bill was introduced and passed in 2020 after a change in government in 2016. Interestingly, the opposers of the 2013 bill, again, have made several attempts to stop the passage of the new legislation, claiming that the new legislation is merely a reproduction and renaming of the 2013 bill and does not address their previous concerns. One of the main concerns of the opposition is that the legislation has very rigid requirements which do not serve the interests of Ghanaian farmers and the agricultural industry. After a thorough analysis of the PVP Act of 2020, the TRIPS Agreement, the UPOV-91 Convention, and the arguments advanced by both factions, this paper strongly argues that the inflexible requirements of the TRIPS Agreement and the UPOV-91 Convention—the source of the PVP legislation—is the main cause of this conflict.

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