But are they Meritorious? Genetic Productivity Gains under Plant Intellectual Property Rights

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effect of Plant Variety Protection (PVP) on the productive merit ⁄yield increases of US seed varieties. As an example, we use wheat varieties, which are and have been available as both protected and unprotected under PVP from both the public and private sectors. We find evidence that PVP has contributed to the genetic improvement of wheat, using varietal trial data from Washington State. As the private open-pollinated varieties exist only because of PVP and are higher yielding, these results indicate a clear public benefit from PVP.