African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) Joins UPOV 11/06/2014 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)The Geneva-based Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) announced yesterday that the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) became its seventy-second member. In a press release [pdf], UPOV said OAPI “operates a plant variety protection system which covers the territory of its 17 member states.” OAPI member states are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Togo. According to the release, Francis Gurry, director general of UPOV and of the World Intellectual Property Organization, said, “The accession of OAPI is a milestone in the history of UPOV and promises to help strengthen the system of plant variety protection around the world and to broaden international cooperation in this area.” A few weeks ago, UPOV approved draft legislation submitted by the counterpart English-speaking African intergovernmental organisation, the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) (IPW, Development, 15 April 2014). Civil society has raised concerns about the potential accession by AROPI to UPOV, particularly over the possibility that it could disrupt age-old practices of saving and reusing seeds by local farmers. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window) Related "African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) Joins UPOV" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
[…] It is not clear whether it is mandatory for OAPI members to ratify the UPOV91 Convention. The fact that least-developed countries, which have so far no obligations to fulfil the requirements of the World Trade Organisation Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), would ratify the UPOV Convention and in particular the 1991 version of the Convention, which is considered the most stringent, has raised questions from civil society (IPW, Africa, 11 June 2014). […] Reply