• "Don’t be an accomplice to counterfeiting"
• Cooperation is key in the fight against counterfeiting
• Collaboration between SPTO and the FIPSE-ITEMAS Network
• Protecting plant varieties, seen from all angles

Protecting plant varieties, seen from all angles

On 11 June, the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (SPTO) and the Spanish Office for Plant Varieties (OEVV), in collaboration with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO), held a meeting on ‘The protection of plant varieties and other Industrial Property rights in the development of agriculture’.

The purpose of the meeting was to provide information on the regulatory framework governing the Intellectual and Industrial Property rights relating to new plant varieties, given their specific characteristics.

Present were specialists from the OEVV (Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment), the UPOV, the legal department of the CPVO, the Spanish National Association of New Plant Breeders (ANOVE) and the SPTO. The event closed with a panel discussion in which all the speakers participated. It attracted a large audience and was streamed over the Internet.

Plant breeding
The essence of plant breeding is to create a genetic variation from a plant species and, from that variation, to select plants with desirable characteristics that can be inherited in a stable manner. Among other advantages, such new varieties of plants offer greater yield, better quality and better resistance to pests and disease, so they are key for increasing productivity and product quality in agriculture, horticulture and forestry, saving costs and minimising pressure on the environment.

Because of new pests and diseases and changes in climate conditions and in user needs, farmers and producers are constantly seeking new plant varieties.