Intellectual Property and Promoting R&D for the Public Interest in the Asian Region: Inclusionary and Distributive Innovation System Options

There are important public needs to be addressed within the Asian region, such as degraded environments and their impact on health and the land productivity needed to support the population. Hundreds of millions of people in the region are chronically malnourished or suffer from the lack of reliable sources of clean water. While food production can be boosted by new farm technologies raising crop yields, inappropriate use of agricultural inputs can further degrade water and land to the detriment of further production. For example, global fertilizer use has gone up at least nine-fold in the decades since the 1950s, leading to significant contamination of surface and ground water and estuarine environments.