From neglect to protection: recognising the importance of farmers’ varieties in Sri Lanka

This chapter provides an overview of the Sri Lankan intellectual property framework, while also describing the evolution of the plant variety protection (PVP) Bill. It presents a series of arguments to explain why Sri Lanka should introduce protections for farmers’ varieties in a new version of the PVP Bill. The chapter offers two potential approaches that Sri Lanka could follow to protect farmers’ varieties. It argues that the Sri Lankan PVP Bill should be revised to incorporate protections for farmers’ varieties. The development of the PVP Bill was the result of a collaboration between the National Intellectual Property Office of Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan Department of Agriculture. The traditional varieties that have survived suffer from marginalisation, given that both public and private seed entities in Sri Lanka have focused solely on modern crop varieties in their breeding and commercialisation programmes.