Japan to Use Property Rights to Profit from Farm Products Overseas
17:10 JST, January 15, 2024
TOKYO (Jiji Press) — Japan’s agriculture ministry will create a mechanism to earn more profits overseas from Japanese agricultural products, such as luxury fruits, by actively making use of intellectual property rights.
Up until now, Japan has focused the use of intellectual property rights in the agriculture area on preventing the smuggling of seeds and saplings of luxury fruits developed at home to foreign countries.
Under the new mechanism, the ministry’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization and others will establish an organization tasked with managing and protecting plant breeders’ rights, a form of intellectual property rights for newly developed plant varieties.
The envisaged organization will license such rights to trustworthy overseas partners and collect royalties from them.
If Japan manages to secure agricultural licensing agreements in the Southern Hemisphere, which experiences opposite seasons to Japan, the country can expand exports to such licensee countries as such products are shipped to markets at different times of the year, ministry officials said. Japan also thinks the new mechanism will help bolster the monitoring of possible intellectual property rights violations overseas through licensee countries.
The ministry also seeks to protect Japanese farmers from competition with rivals in licensee countries.
In a survey released in 2020 by the ministry, seeds or saplings of 36 kinds of agricultural products developed in Japan were found to have been smuggled out to China and South Korea, including strawberries and grapes. Those cases include the Shine Muscat grapes, whose saplings were smuggled into China around 2016. The total area of land devoted to Shine Muscat farming in China is now around 30 times larger than that in Japan.
"Society" POPULAR ARTICLE
-
Cherry tree falls on man on Sanneizaka steps leading to famous Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto
-
Tokyo District Court Rules AI Cannot Be Issued Patents; Law Recognizes Only ‘Natural Persons’ as Inventors
-
Small Animal That Appears to be Mouse Found in Chojuku Bread Products; Some Brands on Same Production Line to be Recalled Voluntarily
-
Earthquake Hits Japan’s Ibaraki, Tochigi, Chiba Prefectures, No Risk of Tsunami
-
Man Repels Bear Attack in Hokkaido by Kicking its Face After Encountering 2 Bears While Sightseeing
JN ACCESS RANKING
- Weakening Yen Adds Complexity to BOJ’s Rate Hike Decisions; Rising Commodity Prices may Impact ‘Virtuous Cycle’ Efforts
- Japanese Seafood Exports to China Sink 57% in FY23; U.S. Becomes Largest Seafood Export Destination
- 70% of Japan Companies to Raise Pay Scales in FY 2024
- ASEAN Plus 3 Share Concerns About Excessive Exchange Rate Fluctuation; Seeking Stability in Exchange Rate
- Minutes Show Policymaker Wants BOJ to Consider Further Rate Hikes Further