Gold kiwifruit varieties stolen; Zespri decides to file an intellectual property lawsuit to prevent commercial varieties from leaking out
New Zealand's Zespri kiwifruit company has reportedly been hit by news of variety misappropriation. According to reports, contract-farming Chinese growers unauthorizedly provided the golden round-headed kiwifruit and Gold9 to other Chinese farmers who had not signed cooperation contracts, and this act has already infringed the
New Zealand's Zesprikiwifruit company has reportedly been hit by news of variety misappropriation. According to reports, contract-farming Chinese growers unauthorizedly provided the golden round-headed kiwifruit and Gold9 (Gold9) to other Chinese farmers who had not signed cooperation contracts, and this act has already infringed the company's plant variety rights. For this reason, Zespri resolved at its annual meeting in New Zealand to take legal action against those shareholders and farmers who improperly used the varieties.
The golden round-headed and Gold9 kiwifruit varieties are new products of Zespri in recent years. But in August 2017, news broke that Chinese farmers had taken these two commercial varieties to other production areas and let other farmers without authorization grow them.
Zespri's chief operating officer Simon Limmer said: Zespri will no longer sign contract-growing kiwifruit agreements with these farmers, and will refuse to buy fruit from farmers who misappropriated the varieties, while also requiring farmers to destroy unauthorized kiwifruit seedlings.
Large Chinese agricultural enterprises are gradually attaching importance to plant variety rights in order to protect the rights and interests of their own new varieties
Although China is an important overseas market for Zespri, Zespri will still take civil action against violating farmers, strongly expressing its insistence on and position of defending plant variety rights. This misappropriation situation is not limited to one province in China; in at least 4 of Zespri's kiwifruit production areas in China, suspected cases have occurred in which farmers, without authorization, privately planted golden round-headed kiwifruit.
Zespri president Lain Jager said: Handling intellectual property lawsuits in the crop field in China is not easy, and there have been no similar cases in the past to refer to. The Chinese authorities are actively assisting Zespri in handling the matter; at present the company has grasped the whole course of the variety misappropriation incident, and China is also actively educating farmers about knowledge related to "plant variety rights" (note).
China's agricultural development is rising rapidly, and large agricultural enterprises are actively researching and developing new varieties; of course they also hope to protect their own seedlings through plant variety rights. That the Chinese government actively cooperates with Zespri is also entirely understandable.
With the globalization of agriculture, how to prevent commercial varieties from leaking out is an important business strategy for fruit companies
A globalized business strategy has allowed Zespri to quickly grasp kiwifruit production capacity around the world and to adjust marketing market strategies and production planning at any time. The golden round-headed kiwifruit infringed this time is an important Zespri variety, and the company holds exclusive variety rights to it for at least 20 years, so becoming a Zespri partner farmer is not a simple matter. Growers must pay 20,000 US dollars per hectare to sign a contract with the company in order to have the right to grow golden round-headed kiwifruit, while the actual contract-farming terms vary by country.
China was once Zespri's largest market, and the difficulty of farmers' weak awareness of plant variety rights is also an issue Zespri cannot avoid. Ensuring that kiwifruit growers have relatively high economic income and market competitiveness has always been a concept and operating result that Zespri is proud of.
Therefore, in the face of this variety misappropriation incident, Zespri does not dare to take it lightly. After all, protecting the rights and interests of its own growers and preventing the impact of variety misappropriators on the kiwifruit market is an important responsibility of Zespri.
