The Impact of Plant Variety Protection Regulations on the Governance of Agri-Food Value Chains

Antonella Di Fonzo, Vanessa Nardone, Negin Fathinejad and Carlo Russo
Additional contact information
Antonella Di Fonzo: Department of Economics and Law, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy
Vanessa Nardone: Department of Economics and Law, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy
Negin Fathinejad: Department of Economics and Law, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy
Carlo Russo: Department of Economics and Law, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino (FR), Italy

Social Sciences, 2019, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: More than 25 years after the 1991 reform of the Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) treaty, the regulation of Plant Variety Protection (PVP) is still controversial. While the incentives to private innovations are unquestionable, concerns have been raised about farmers’ access to resources, the weakening of their bargaining power, their entrepreneurial freedom, and ultimately their welfare. Our paper investigates the effect of PVP regulation on the governance of agri-food value chains (AFVC) with a small-scale survey of kiwi producers in Italy. We found that AFVC trading-protected (club) plant varieties are more likely to exhibit captive governance forms than those trading the free varieties. Nevertheless, the producers of club kiwis achieve higher returns from their investments and bear less risk than others. Because of the high demand for the club fruits, the breeders must give farmers highly profitable contract terms in order to elicit the production and to promote the adoption of the new cultivar. As a consequence, farmers are capturing a share of the value of innovation, even if the breeders have a strong protection. The long-run sustainability of this win-win agreement between breeders and farmers might be jeopardized should the demand for the new varieties fall.

Keywords: plant variety protection; agri-food value chains; agri-food governance; kiwifruits club-varietal (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/3/91/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/3/91/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:8:y:2019:i:3:p:91-:d:212728

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().