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African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) Joins UPOV

11/06/2014 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment

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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.

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Creative Commons License"African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) Joins UPOV" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Filed Under: IP-Watch Briefs, IP Policies, Language, Themes, Venues, Access to Knowledge/ Education, Africa, Biodiversity/Genetic Resources/Biotech, Development, English, Environment, Human Rights, Patents/Designs/Trade Secrets, Regional Policy, Technical Cooperation/ Technology Transfer, Traditional and Indigenous Knowledge, UPOV / CBD, United Nations - other

Trackbacks

  1. UPOV This Week Focuses On International Cooperation System; Benin Curiously Ratifies Twice - Intellectual Property Watch says:
    05/04/2017 at 9:58 pm

    […] 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). […]

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