South Africa is considered to be a “hotspot” for biodiversity and more than 22,000 plant species occur within its boundaries. This represents 10% of the world’s species, although the land surface of South Africa is less than 1% of the earth. The country is divided into seven biomes and into 68 vegetation types (Low and Rebelo 1996). The Savanna biome covers 33% of the surface of the country, bu...

The economic theory of property rights is applied to the issue of the conservation of plant genetic diversity, an issue often discussed in terms of benefit sharing, in order to demonstrate that the assignment of property rights is important for reasons of efficiency as well as for equity. Given the existence of transactions costs within an industry, the location of a property rights assignment ...

Plant genetic resources collection and utilization had made a huge impact in balancing the genetic diversity of the existing crop plant species and their application in genome based studies had also increased widely. Primarily studies were based on model species, although it now enhances the transferability of information to crops and related species. With the tremendous outbreak of new high-th...