Biodiversity and Vegetable Breeding in the Light of Developments in Intellectual Property Rights

Farming and plant breeding have been closely associated since the early days when crops were first domesticated. Plant breeding was built on biodiversity and on the work of 10,000 years of farmers’s selection and some generations of breeders. Without understanding the science behind it, early farmers saved the seed from the best portion of their crop each season. Over the years, they selected the traits that they liked the best, transforming and domesticating the vegetable crops they grew. Every vegetable product we see on the market has benefited from plant breeding in one way or another. New varieties were created by breeders by making use of the total genetic information that was present in a gene pool. Access to that genetic variation, the biodiversity, was required to achieve variety improvement. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Vilmorin-Andrieux family, owner of the first commercial seed company, played an important role in a number of theoretical and technical advances in commercial vegetable breeding, such as producing the first vegetable seed catalog for horticulturists, developing the principles of genealogical breeding programs, improving seed quality through cross-breeding initiatives, and creating disease-resistant and hybrid varieties of vegetables (Gayon & Zallen, 1998). In 1856 Louis Vilmorin published “Note on the creation of a new race of beetroot and considerations on heredity in plants” establishing the theoretical groundwork for the modern vegetable breeding industry. The first suggestion to exploit hybrid vigor or heterosis in vegetables was made by Hayes & Jones (1916) for cucumber. Commercial hybridization of vegetable species began in the United States in the middle 1920s with sweet corn, followed by onions in the 1940s. Since that time, private breeding companies have been placing more and more emphasis on the development of vegetable hybrids, and many species of vegetables have been bred as hybrid varieties for the marketplace. Besides heterosis, hybrids also allow breeders to combine the best horticultural traits and multiple disease and stress resistances. Furthermore, if the parents are homozygous, the hybrids will be uniform, an increasingly important trait in commercial vegetable market production. The creation of vegetable hybrid varieties requires homozygous inbred parental lines, which provide a natural protection of plant breeders’ rights without legal recourse and ensure a market for seed companies.