Book Review 30
Review
Title: The sustainability of Plants and Plant Intellectual Property Rights
ISBN 13: 9788757426656
Published: 2012
Pages: 289
Cost: $42
Rating (1-5): 4
Submitted By: Noaman, Maher Mohammed
Date posted: December 10, 2012
This excellent book analyzes the way that intellectual property law, environmental law, and agricultural law affect the sustainability of plants.
With an African background, “The sustainability of Plants and Plant Intellectual Property Rights” book, identifies the legal challenges for the sustainability of plants in the context of African countries being provider of plants and European countries being users of plants. The author of the book, Abeba Tadesse Gebreselassie is a post doctoral researcher at the Department of Law, Aarhus University, Denmark. This book analyzes the way that intellectual property law, environmental law, and agricultural law affect the sustainability of plants. It explores the way that these competing areas of law impact on the way that plant genetic resources are accessed and used, in particular as regards the access and benefit-sharing regimes established under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The book also identifies the problems that arise because of the fact that plant genetic resources may originate in one country but physically be available elsewhere. One of the strengths of this book is that it develops novel and workable solutions to deal with these transnational problems. The book is divided into three major parts; however, the first part includes overview, definitions and ambiguity, and regulation of plants. Part 2 includes sustainability of plants, and conservation and implications of gene banks, while Part 3 contains the interface between plant IP and sustainability of plants that focuses on balance and flexibilities in plant IP laws as well as the protection of new varieties of plants. Each Part of the book is wrapped up with an excellent conclusion. This book is highly recommended to policy-makers, researchers, lawyers, and international organizations who work in the fields of intellectual property rights, environmental law and agricultural law.