My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 74 in this group. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for crediting me with knowledge of international law on IP, but in fact I am not very well informed on that. I will raise some questions that were put to me by the Royal Society, which suggested an amendment of this nature. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, and my noble friend Lord Patel for putting their names to the amendment. My noble friend Lord Patel sends his apologies; he is stranded in Scotland, as are many other noble Lords, I suspect.
My amendment merely asks the Government to review and publish guidance on the implications of the Bill for the law of intellectual property. This is important because all those involved in the development and marketing of precision-bred organisms need to know where they stand. Are these organisms to be treated, from the point of view of IP, like transgenic organisms or like conventionally bred organisms? GMOs currently enjoy greater intellectual property protection than new plant and animal varieties produced using other breeding technologies, which is justified in part by the greater expense of securing regulatory approval for the cultivation of varieties carrying GM traits.
But intellectual property protections significantly reduce the accessibility of the benefits of genetic technologies, and they also contribute to public concerns about the commercial use of technologies. As we heard at Second Reading, the fact that Monsanto and other companies had patent rights for GMOs and had inserted terminator genes into the plants was a major objection to transgenic crops 20-odd years ago.
If genome-edited products are not treated as GMOs, they should enjoy no greater intellectual property protection than the products of traditional breeding technologies, such as plant breeders’ rights—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, also made this point. Members of the plant breeding industry need to be able to breed from each other’s varieties, and it would not be in the public interest if the adoption of genome editing for crop improvement were to compromise the ability of plant breeders to make crosses with each other’s varieties.
Plant breeders may argue that they should benefit from patent protection in the same way as for GMOs in order to recover their costs, including the royalties to which the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, referred on the CRISPR technology. However, I suggest that the public interest overrides this argument. Therefore, I very much hope that the Minister will confirm that, since precision-bred organisms are defined in the Bill as equivalent to organisms that could have been produced by conventional breeding, they will not enjoy greater IP protection than conventional varieties. Surely this is the logical conclusion.