Reversal of interests

Raustiala and Victor (2004) describe an interesting reversal in position on the part of developing countries in the negotiations (spread across multiple international fora) around protection of plant genetic resources (PGR) - that is, plant IP.

The position of developed countries stayed pretty constant throughout: they were (on behalf of their plant biotech industries) in favor of strong IP rights for what's called "worked" PGR, plant genetic material that's the product of deliberate human manipulation, and generally also for loose rules on the protection of raw PGR, which forms the basis for the creation of worked PGR, and is thus essentially an input.

Developing countries, however, went from being against pretty much any form of PGR IP protection to being fairly strongly for it, in the course of about a decade. Raustiala and Victor describe this as the result of the relatively sudden recognition of a new threat/opportunity: during the same period that PGR protection was being debated, there was also rising pressure on developing countries to halt deforestation and protect forests, which they saw as an intrusion on their sovereignty. This battle led to an effort to quantify the value of forests, including their value as a source of raw PGR. Environmentalist groups encouraged developing countries to combine their impulses to assert sovereign control over forests with a conservation motive, by encouraging them to see forests as a source of valuable raw IP that they could both assert sovereignty over and protect. Suddenly, developing nations too had a stake in some kind of IP protection regime that guaranteed them rights to raw IP in their territory. This isn't the precise kind of IP protection developed nations wanted, but with both sides now interested in some kind of IP deal, so there was room for mutually productive deal-making.

It's interesting because something similar happened in the law of the sea treaty negotiations as well; negotiation was kind of stalled until a couple of shifts took place, one of which was the sudden recognition by developing countries that they had an interest in a treaty because they could use it to guarantee their right to profit from deep-sea mineral exploitation.

It doesn't seem, thus far, that either hope has really panned out all that well. But they both got deals moving at the time.