Syngenta e-licensing heralds new era for sharing of plant science innovation

A new innovation platform launched by Syngenta, the international agri-business company, means to broaden availability to some patented traits and technologies for vegetables, but also aims at opening new ways to use the intellectual property system.

The e-licensing platform, named TraitAbility, provides “quick and easy” access to patented native traits of Syngenta commercial vegetable varieties. It also provides access to patented enabling technologies, like plant transformation and protein targeting.

In the perspective of a growing world population expected to reach nine billion people by 2050, Alexander Tokarz, head of the vegetables section at Syngenta said at a press briefing in Geneva on 17 January: “We need a concerted effort and a lot of innovation.”

"We need more off the same land,” by increasing productivity through better agricultural inputs, in particular better seeds and better genetics, he said.

Taking an example from a developed country, Tokarz said “If you are a farmer needing to increase productivity, you are not likely to save your seeds from last year anymore like you may have done 20 years ago,” because that would achieve the opposite. The farmer would instead look for the best variety fitting his specific needs.

But innovation goes beyond productivity, he said. For example, “[we need] vegetables that transport better, keep longer on the shelves, taste better, have different colours, different flavours, different textures than what we used to have 20 years ago,” he said. “We want our food to be more nutritional, more healthy and more readily available at low prices,” and all of this needs innovation, he said.

"We find there is still a somewhat romantic view in the public about how to achieve this,” Tokarz said. People picture the farmers selecting the best seeds from the field but it is not like that anymore, he added, as seed plant breeding is a high-tech industry today.

Farmer-saved seeds have long been a bone of contention between farmers and breeders, as the latter claim royalties on saved seeds from original protected varieties while farmers are fighting for the right to save, use and exchange their farm seeds. Seed exchange has also been praised by some as a key factor of agrobiodiversity conservation.