The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (MAFF) has announced plans to fund new integrated efforts to bring more revenue to Japan through protection and exploitation of Japan-registered varieties of plants in other countries. MAFF asserts that many good Japan-bred varieties have been taken out of Japan to places like China and Korea, leading to large losses of profit for Japanese farmers (a case where redress was found was with Japan-registered mikan tangerines that were caught and held in Korea less than a year ago).
MAFF announced it will seek a private organization it will fund to manage the rights of Japanese plant variety developers by acquiring corresponding rights in other countries and working with foreign intellectual property law firms to enforce those rights. In addition, the selected entity may train local workers of selected foreign regions to grow and then ship Japanese varieties of plants to global markets. The Japan Agricultural News comments that such a country (countries) would likely be in the Southern Hemisphere, apparently, so that Japan and its partner could provide the same registered produce to global markets regularly (a government-backed supply chain management tactic for produce?).
This ambitious project to push back unrecognized use of Japanese plant varieties and to promote Japanese exploitation of Japanese innovation for plants is part of the Japanese government’s overall aim to sell 1 trillion yen (about US$ 9.3 billion) per year. Finding allegedly infringing varieties will be challenging, but perhaps with the rise in tracing of produce it will be more feasible for foreign firms working with whatever organization the MAFF selects for this integrated approach to international plant variety protection and use.
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Taro Yaguchi
Sources
“海外への品種流出防止 知財保護へ新組織 侵害対策一元的に 農水省 [MAFF to fight foreign drain on plant varieties with new organization for integrated IP protection]” The Japan Agricultural News, https://www.agrinews.co.jp/p48856.html, September 30, 2019; accessed October 1, 2019.
