Twenty-eight years ago, signatories to UPOV 91 (The Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties), adopted the 1991 convention designed to strengthen plant breeders’ rights (PBRs) in member countries. Despite this international agreement, the private sector has yet to invest heavily in crops protected by PBRs, but rather has focused the fast majority of their investments in hybrid and genetically modified crops (Alston et al 2009). Given that wheat is the largest food crop in the world, the failure of UPOV 91 PBRs to generate significant investment in wheat breeding is particularly worrisome for future global food security and germane to this International Wheat Congress (Gray and Malla 2007).

In our analysis, we focus on Australia, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom to compare the outcomes and explore the various factors that contributed to the successes and the failures of these systems in achieving desired outcomes. In the United States, the lack of any specific coordination mechanism has made royalty collection too expensive for private entrants. In the UK, the royalty system supports a small and fragmented private breeding effort (Galushko and Gray, 2014). In France, a government mandated producer/seed industry negotiated a Contribution Volontaire Obligatoire which operates like an end point royalty has enabled a robust and moderately effective system of royalty collection (Alston et al 2012). While it has some weaknesses, Australia has by far the most robust system. The GRDC relies on 4P partnerships for wheat breeding activities which are funded through an EPR system, and currently generates $50 million per year in royalties (Kingwell 2005).

Examining the successes and failures in these UPOV 91 countries shows there is very strong correlation between producer support for research funding, royalty collection and the ability to implement an effective royalty collection system. Countries that have yet to implement an effective system for royalty collection may be able to learn from this international experience. While we rely on several economic studies in our analysis, we write the paper in a non-technical language to engage a much broader audience of scientists that will attend the wheat congress.