Plant Breeders Bill passes through second reading

The Plant Breeders Bill which seeks to establish a legal framework to provide and promote an effective system of plant variety has passed through its second reading stage in Parliament.

It aims at providing incentives for investors, breeders and researchers to pursue innovation in the development of new varieties of plants for the benefit of society.

It does this by adopting the intellectual property protection model of making available to plant breeders exclusive rights on the basis of a set of uniform and clearly defined principles.

The Deputy Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Professor Dominic Ayine, on Friday moved the motion for  the second reading of the bill.

He was seconded by the Chairman of the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee, Mr Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin.

Presenting the report of the committee, Mr Bagbin stated that Ghana was already in the arena of plant breeding but recent breeding initiatives by the Crops Research Institute, the Savanna Agricultural Research Institute, the universities and private plant breeders had failed to yield the required dividends to the owners.

He said that was because the new varieties were appropriated and used by persons who failed to recognise the investment and efforts of the breeders and the need to pay the necessary royalties to them due to the absence of legal protection.

Committee's observations

Mr Bagbin said the committee discovered that almost all countries, including Ghana' s neighbours, Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, were making efforts at providing plant variety protection.

Ghana and Ghanaian plant breeders were at a disadvantage without any legal protection, particularly in the advent of generic engineering.

He added that while it took 10 years or more to develop a plant variety of most plant species by conventional plant breeding, generic engineering offered the prospect of the creation of species and varieties in a much shorter time using transfer of genes into genomes.

Debate

In the ensuing debate, all the MPs who contributed, with the exception of the MP for Manhyia South, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh, supported the passage of the bill.

The passage of the bill was long overdue, argued Dr Yakubu Alhassan, a Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture and MP for Mion.

But Dr Opoku-Prempeh drew the attention of the House to the objection of the passage of the bill by the Ghana National Farmers and Fishermen Association and called on the House to create a time for meeting with the association.

Daily Graphic/Ghana