Agricultural Innovation and Sustainable Development

Global agriculture is confronted by a number of substantial challenges, with some of them being existential. The principal challenge is climate change, which threatens desertification, with attendant increases in salinity, insect and animal infestations, and floods (as well as droughts). These impacts will remove some areas from cultivation at a time when the global population is projected to increase from 7.2 billion persons today to 9.7 billion persons in 2050. The agricultural sector in developing countries and less-developed countries is a source of employment and livelihood for the majority of the population, a major foreign exchange earner and supplier of raw materials to local industry, and has important potential for the economic development of those countries.

Significant sustainable agricultural innovation is required to deal with these challenges. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) may be of crucial importance for modern agriculture. They serve to make R&D in agriculture attractive by encouraging investment in new technologies and generating tradeable assets.