Hargreaves, Robert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8778-7417 (2026) Beyond UPOV: India's PPVRF Act 2001 as a Climate Adaptive Sui Generis Model for Plant Variety Intellectual Property. Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law. (In Press)

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Abstract

Plant variety protection law is approaching a crisis of fit. The 1991 Act of the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, which now defines the operative model for plant variety protection in most jurisdictions, was constructed around an implicit baseline of agronomic and climatic stability and a sharp doctrinal distinction between commercial breeder activity and farmer use. Climate change is dismantling that baseline. As growing conditions become unstable, the locus of varietal adaptation is shifting toward distributed on farm work by smallholder farmers in centres of crop diversity, much of it on landraces and farmer varieties that the UPOV architecture treats as either legally invisible or as capable of being drawn back into the exclusive rights of the initial breeder. This article argues that India’s Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001, often described as a sui generis exception under TRIPS Article 27.3(b), should be reconsidered as a structural alternative model for plant variety protection in a warming world. Through analysis of the Act’s distinctive features, the recognition of farmers as breeders under section 39(1)(i), the registration architecture for new, extant, essentially derived and farmers’ varieties under Chapter III, the overriding farmers’ rights provision in section 39(1)(iv), the compulsory licensing scheme under sections 47 to 53, and the benefit sharing arrangements through the National Gene Fund established under section 45, the article shows that the PPVFR architecture responds to several structural limitations of UPOV 1991 in ways directly relevant to climate adaptation. The argument proceeds through analysis of the PepsiCo litigation, including the Division Bench judgment in PepsiCo v Kuruganti that has narrowed the public interest grounds for revocation under section 34, and through consideration of the Draft Seeds Bill 2025 as a live instance of the way seed-marketing regulation adjacent to the PVR regime can undermine an adaptation-oriented PVR architecture at the point of market access. It concludes that the PPVFR template, taken together with an honest acknowledgment of its implementation deficits, should now be taken seriously as a model around which international plant variety protection norms should evolve, rather than as an Indian exception to those norms.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
School/Department:	York Business School
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15958

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