Many other treaties have implications for agriculture. In general, the credibility and effectiveness of international efforts to improve agricultural knowledge, science and technologies for development and meet development and sus-tainability goals will partially depend on the consistency and effectiveness of international conventions and agreements. Increasingly, agricultural scientists will find their own work shaped by such agreements and will find opportunities in the ability to provide innovations that facilitate their implementation.
6.4.3 Enlarging the range of proprietary regimes
6.4.3.1 General issues concerning proprietary regimes and IPR
A continuing reconsideration of the legal and cultural definitions of property is necessary as agriculture faces the challenges of a changing world. In the late 20th century, international institutions and most national governments promoted relatively simple property rules based on either the private ownership of goods or public ownership (goods that were considered as a public utility and were either publicly owned or heavily regulated by the government). There have been counter-trends in the definition of property that have been more compelling and many of them are likely to become critical pieces of the response agriculture will have to make to global economic, social and environmental challenges over the next half-century. At a minimum, a critical re-assessment is advised while allowing for more research and experimentation in the area of property regimes. In order to better understand the different property regimes a quick review of the classification of the different goods that determine their property regime, based on their consumption and access, is essential (Table 6-3).
As mentioned above, there has been a tendency so far to simplify the concept and attribute only two kinds of regimes: public or private. In reality of course not all goods can be classified under these two categories as there are few goods that are purely public or purely private. For example, air used to be thought of as a public good, but as a result of pollution, this has come to be considered as somewhat of a
Table 6-3. Property regimes by levels of consumption and access.
Consumption |
Access |
Exclusive |
Non-exclusive1 |
Rival |
Private (e.g., food, clothing, cars) |
Common pool (e.g., air, water, soil and ocean fisheries,2 landscapes) |
Non-rival3 |
Club/Toll (e.g., toll-roads INTELSAT, Suez Canal, Panama Canal, private schools, theatres, professional associations) |
Public (e.g., public roads, sunshine, national defense) |
Non-exclusive: once available, it is not possible to prevent free access to it by all. 2In some cases, soil and ocean fisheries access may also be viewed as exclusive. 3Non-rival: one person's consumption does not diminish its availability to others. |
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hybrid public good, because its erstwhile non-rival nature has been eroded due to technology and policy (Box 6-14).
This has lead to the emergence of a new category of goods called "impure public/private goods," which can be further divided into club/toll or common pool goods. These goods may call for a double approach: partly legitimizing privatization of these goods and partly seen as a global common good by the society. A new proprietary regime can be established for these "hybrid" goods that would do more justice than either purely public or private ownership. This type of regime could allow a sustainable management of the commons and avoid over-exploitation or loss of associated resources as is expected in the "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin, 1968).
Such a vision of "hybrid" goods has been established with the concept of "common property regimes," developed for natural resource management projects. Common property regimes can be defined as those resource management systems in which resources or facilities are subject to individual use but not to individual possession or disposal, where access is controlled and the total rate of consumption varies according to the number of users and the type of use (Forni, 2000).
Thus, proprietary questions undoubtedly raise many complex issues of which more research would allow a better understanding, so that they could be used to maximize ben-
Box 6-14. The complexity of property questions illustrated with water law reform or species and genetic resource protection
For various reasons, throughout Europe and North America, and much of the rest of the world, water has historically been to a large degree considered a public good to be owned and traded outside the market, and/or with strong restrictions on market transactions. There are arguments that promote the creation of water markets. It has been shown that in many circumstances water markets can be created that provide efficiencies so convincing that difficulties can be overcome while meeting reasonable concerns for quality, access, and equity. But the creation of water markets raises other important questions such as the ownership claims (is a water right held by a landowner or by the legally constituted water district of which the landowner is a member?), varied and complicated market rules (different legal and geographic conditions prevailing in the different regions), etc. (Roth et al., 2005).
Property rules and policy with regard to such fundamental resources as water can have critical impacts on such clearly nonmarket issues as the survival of endangered species. The effort to protect species has already created highly charged conflicts regarding private and public claims on land and resources. These conflicts involve matters that clearly cannot be addressed simply through market mechanisms; they are in fact claims that are based on a universal human interest in the protection of species in conflict with private property interests (Fairfax and Guenzler, 2001). |