Postdoctoral Position in IP, Plant Breeding and International Development
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE
CENTRE FOR HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Applications are now being accepted for a 9-month postdoctoral research
position within a new AHRC-funded project on intellectual property,
narrowly and broadly construed, as a factor conditioning innovation in
plant breeding among small farmers in rural India. The project is a
collaboration between the University of Leeds' Centre for History and
Philosophy of Science, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and
Competition in Munich, and the India-based Art of Living Foundation.
Further information about the position and how to apply can be found at https://jobs.leeds.ac.uk/
The application deadline is 21 November. An overview of the project follows.
One of the major challenges facing global development is the question of
how to arrange the laws and customs surrounding intellectual property
(IP) in order to encourage innovation. Bringing together Gregory
Radick's theoretical and conceptual work on IP over the long-run of the
history of science and technology, Mrinalini Kochupillai's
legal-empirical studies of IP and innovation concerning plant varieties
in India, and the resources of the Art of Living Foundation, this
project will study a sample of innovative Indian farmers in order to
explore the comparative advantages and disadvantages of two ways of
organising innovation in a developing nation.
Indian farmers have traditionally participated in an informal culture of
keeping seeds season after season (seed saving) and of swapping seeds
(seed exchange), and under this system, new varieties have periodically
emerged and been cultivated. More recently, the Indian government has
promoted a different system, changing the law to give enhanced IP
protection to scientifically derived varieties from state-run
institutions or private firms, and encouraging farmers to replace their
seed stocks regularly (seed replacement) by purchasing seeds from the
marketplace. A key question is whether this increasing promotion of
policies of seed replacement and IP regimes that have "exclusivity" as
their basic underlying rationale could have a negative effect on
cultures of sharing, and therefore on seed-related innovations, among
farmers in rural India. The possibility of such an effect was dramatized
by the case of the Indian farmer Dadji Ramji Khobragade. Collecting
seeds and replanting them year on year, he eventually developed a new
rice variety which became popular throughout the region. As is typical
of the culture among small farmers of the regions, Khobragade was happy
to share his seeds with farmers from other villages. But when university
researchers took his seeds to conduct experiments, and four years later
released an improved variety, they did not credit Khobragade.
Furthermore, under a law governing IP and plant varieties, Khobragade
was not entitled to any share of the profits from the sale of this new
variety.
The project will have three phases. In the first phase, a project
researcher based partly at the University of Leeds and partly at the Max
Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, will
undertake systematic background study of the relevant scholarly
literatures while at the same time using the Plant Variety Application
database (freely available from the Plant Authority of India) to
identify Indian farmers for interview. The second phase will be a
two-month field study in India, travelling from region to region in
order to conduct in-depth interviews with innovative farmers -- that is,
farmers who have registered new plant varieties -- in order to learn
their views and experiences regarding the different cultures of IP
surrounding Indian plant-variety innovation, as well as the related
impacts on agricultural biodiversity. The researcher will also speak on
local/regional radio in India to publicise the project. In the third
phase the researcher will return to Leeds to process the interview data
and produce a journal article, one or more articles for trade journals
etc., and a report for the Foundation. Throughout the project the
researcher will use social media, the Foundation's website and related
means to promote the project's findings.
The project will end with a conference taking place in Bangalore and
involving the project team, farmers, policy-makers and plant breeders.
With the UN having recently released a report (http://unctad.org/en/