@article{Lindner:171917,
      recid = {171917},
      author = {Lindner, Bob},
      title = {The Future for Frankenstein Foods},
      address = {2000-01},
      number = {411-2016-25739},
      pages = {35},
      year = {2000},
      abstract = {Economic outcomes in the “plant breeding industry” are  being driven by interactions between advances in scientific  knowledge, changes in the legal framework for intellectual  property rights, and competitive forces in the market.  While extended property rights have created the foundation  for new markets, the opportunities arising from scientific  discoveries have provided powerful incentives for firms to  enter these markets and invest in biotechnology. The  competitive forces unleashed by these developments are  likely to transform the production of new plant varieties.  Scientific discoveries in molecular biology are the bedrock  of the biotechnology revolution, and have created the  potential for much vaunted gains in agricultural  productivity and for new products. There are at least two  broad classes of molecular technologies that are relevant  to an economic analysis of crop breeding. One group  improves the efficiency of all plant breeding, including  conventional plant breeding, and includes techniques such  as double haploidy and marker assisted selection. The other  and much more controversial group are the transgenic  technologies used to produce GMO’s. To justify the huge  wave of private investment in intellectual property that  has fuelled the biotechnology revolution to date, as well  as to ensure continued investment in further development of  the technology, two necessary conditions must be satisfied.  Consumers must purchase the final product, and companies  must be able to appropriate enough of the potential value  embodied in improved crop varieties to realise a profitable  return on their investment. Concerns about inadequate  incentives to invest in further development of GMO’s and/or  plant breeding include the following issues: consumer  resistance to GMO’s and the consequent lack of a viable  sized market for the end product of GM food; unanticipated  costs of monitoring compliance and enforcing intellectual  property rights in enabling proprietary molecular  technology as well as in improved crop varieties.  developments in patent law creating excessive transaction  costs, possible patent gridlock, and the “tragedy of the  anti-commons”, freedom to operate problems for public  research and plant breeding programmes, Consumer resistance  to GMO’s poses the most immediate threat to the return on  past investments in biotechnology, but may prove relatively  transitory. Less widely recognised threats to future  investment relate to possible breakdowns in the functioning  of the patent system, and/or to difficulties in  appropriating realised benefits from biotechnology when  embodied in self-pollinated broadacre field crops. Recent  extensions to the scope of intellectual property rights in  plant genetic resources merely provide a mechanism for  private appropriation of some or all of the benefits from  molecular technologies, but do not guarantee the emergence  of efficient markets in intellectual property rights. Nor  do they necessarily overcome high costs of monitoring  compliance and enforcing rights in intellectual property in  biotechnology. Such difficulties are most unlikely to be  resolved by additional government funding of what  traditionally has been a public sector activity.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/171917},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.171917},
}