How seed companies partner to provide access to innovation and plant breeding materials.
WHY IT MATTERS: After two years of existence of the ACLP, more than 95% of the patented traits in agricultural crops in Europe are accessible under fair and reasonable conditions. With a free breeding right and compulsory licensing, the platform attracts companies of different sizes, and different IP backgrounds and practices.
Commitment to Europe’s Agricultural Future
Embracing innovation is the key to ensuring that European agriculture remains both productive and globally competitive in an era of mounting challenges. The EU stakeholders cannot afford to lag behind as other regions rapidly adopt new agricultural technologies. By fostering a culture of innovation, Europe can secure its food supply, empower its farmers, and reinforce its leadership in sustainable, high-quality agriculture on the global stage. Food security in Europe would not have been possible without intensive investments in plant science research and development from public and private entities. Breeding has contributed significantly to agricultural progress, increasing annual yields by an average of 1.16%[1] over the last two decades.
Access to a wide range of genetic diversity is essential for breeding companies to select new traits — such as drought tolerance, pest resistance, and improved nutritional content — to support the breeding of adapted and high-yielding future varieties. The development of new crop varieties requires long-term research investment and collaboration, with an average of 8 to 10 years needed to bring a new variety to the market. Due to the pressing challenges in agriculture, policymakers are currently discussing the legislation around the use of the latest technologies such as genome editing to accelerate the breeding process and the introduction of new, strong varieties in the fields of Europe. These new genomic techniques (NGT) have the potential to better address climate change and its consequences such as new diseases and more frequent natural disasters.
Intellectual property (IP) protection plays a crucial role in safeguarding scientific progress by ensuring a fair return on investment. However, it should not become a barrier that stifles competition or restricts breeders from working with the latest innovations. Striking the right balance between transparency, access, and protection of investments is crucial, as fostering healthy competition within the sector is the key driver of innovation.
Ensuring Fair Access for All Breeders, Regardless of Size or Innovation Capacity
The European seed sector is a highly diverse ecosystem, consisting of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) alongside large companies. This diversity drives innovation, resilience and food security, but it also highlights the need for a level playing field when it comes to accessing new breeding technologies. Seed companies allocate up to 20% of their annual turnover in research and development and this exceptional level of investment can only be sustainably maintained on the long-term if companies get a fair return on investment. Reproducing a plant is a simple process. When this plant is the result of many years of research and improvements to include for example some drought or disease resistance genes, it is necessary that legal instruments protect this intensive work for companies to get a fair return on investment.
In Europe, plant varieties can be protected under the Plant Breeders’ Rights system, established by the UPOV Convention[2], which grants breeders the ability to market their innovations while allowing others to use them for further breeding. However, technological inventions, such as new traits or breeding techniques, may be protected by patents, provided they meet the legal requirements of novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. Over the years, European regulations have clarified that plant varieties and essentially biological processes (breeding processes based on crossing and selection for the production of plants) cannot be patented, ensuring that traditional breeding remains accessible.
SMEs wishing to access patented innovations can face some obstacles: lack of transparency regarding the existence of a patented trait, complexity in negotiating with a patent holder, involvement of a legal firm, insecurity about fair terms and conditions, etc. These time-consuming and expensive processes could lead some companies to refrain from breeding with the latest innovations or to fear an infringement when using a new variety released on the market.
Over the past decade, several initiatives both from associations as well as the breeding industry have emerged to address these issues. To improve transparency regarding patented traits in marketed plant varieties, Euroseeds — the voice of the European plant breeding and seed sector — is hosting the voluntary database PINTO, where companies can display their patents and the plant varieties falling under those patents. To complete this effort of transparency, some companies, including the vast majority of patent holders in Europe, have even taken a further step and built platforms to facilitate access to their patents. These platforms strike a balance between rewarding innovation and ensuring fair availability so no single entity can monopolize critical patented inventions. The success of licensing platforms has been demonstrated in many industries and for example the mobile phone sector has greatly benefited from the Android or Google licensing platforms which helped smaller manufacturers to compete with larger ones by using their own unique features or targeting niche markets. The objective is to limit monopolies and to enhance innovations, a win-win situation for all stakeholders.
In the seed sector, for over a decade, the International Licensing Platform (ILP), has been providing access to patented traits in vegetable crops. Recognizing the need for a similar system for the other crops (corn, sunflower, cereals, sugar beet, potatoes fruits, flowers…), a group of European plant breeding companies — spanning different sizes and backgrounds — came together in 2023 to launch the Agricultural Crops Licensing Platform (ACLP). This initiative ensures that breeders, regardless of their own IP position, can access patented traits under fair and reasonable terms, preventing market distortions and fostering collaboration.
“ACLP does not aim at promoting a specific IP position, it is a technical tool to answer a given situation where PVP and patents are both available to protect plant related inventions and provide for a balanced co-existence of the two systems to the benefit of plant breeders,” explainedClaudia Hallebach, President of the ACLP and KWS Head of Global Legal and Intellectual Property.
Some patent holders had already developed their own licensing platform, but agreeing together to share all their patents under a standard license agreement in a single platform is quite unique.
All patented traits of ACLP members that are present in agricultural crop varieties which are commercially available for cultivation on the open market in the ACLP territory (countries of the European Patent Office, Russia and Ukraine) are accessible through the licensing platform.
More than 95% of Patented Plant Traits Available Under Fair Licensing
ACLP platform members holding patents within the European territory are required to provide access to their entire portfolio within the ACLP framework and disclose it on the PINTO database without exemption. This all-in approach eliminates uncertainty and ensures informed breeding decisions. By accessing patented traits via the ACLP, breeding companies gain the right to conduct free breeding with a patented trait in 40 countries, by simply signing a standard non-assert agreement with the patent holder.
If the patented element remains in the new variety that a seed company intends to commercialize, a license must be obtained from the patent owner. To ensure availability, ACLP’s funding members have agreed on a standard license agreement template in which the royalty fee is the only element that needs to be negotiated. If no agreement is reached within six months, an arbitration process can be asked by the parties. This process results in a guaranteed license, ensuring that, breeders can access over 95% of patented traits, avoiding lengthy negotiations or legal uncertainties. The membership fee is small, proportionate to the size of the company, and only aims at covering the running costs of the association. All templates (non-assert, standard license agreement) and rules are available for free on the website: www.aclp.eu
The plant breeding sector has demonstrated its commitment to transparency, guaranteed access to innovation and fair licensing for all. The members of the ACLP trust there is big potential ahead for the plant breeding industry, ensuring that future advancements remain accessible to all — benefiting breeders, farmers, consumers, and society as a whole.
[1] Steffen Noleppa, Matti Cartsburg; HFFA Research ; The socio-economic and environmental values of plant breeding in the EU and for selected EU member states ; 2021 : HFFA-Research-The-socio-economic-and-environmental-values-of-plant-breeding-in-the-EU.pdf
[2] The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) was established by the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants adopted in Paris in 1961 (revised in 1972, 1978 and 1991) to provide and promote an effective system of plant variety protection, with the aim of encouraging the development of new varieties of plants, for the benefit of society.
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