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Keith Carlson
Keith Carlson at PICO booth in Kelowna.
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Ambrosia Booth at Pacific Ag Show
Robbie Westgard at the Ambrosia booth at the Pacific Agriculture Show. The successful Ambrosia is a target of intellectual property theft.
Fruit growers are in for what Keith Carlson calls a global 'Scientific War' over new fruit varieties developed in Canada.
The soft-spoken CEO of the Okanagan Plant Improvement Corporation (PICO) is not given to exaggeration, but Carlson says Canadian growers face serious challenges to their intellectual property.
There have been three patent applications filed in the United States that challenge the Canadian patents on varieties like the recently unveiled Staccato cherry, and PICO has also discovered illegal plantings of Staccato cherries in four countries: the United States, Argentina, Turkey, and Spain.
"Our first consideration is to protect Canadian growers, and our second is to protect the patent holder, or creator, which in most cases is the government of Canada," says Carlson. "This will be a scientific war."
It is also a war with major implications for Canadian growers. If growers in the US or China could grow the Canadian varieties unchecked, the market prices would crash and the income for Canadian growers would plummet.
PICO's mission is to prevent that from happening.
PICO is a fruit variety rights management company that licenses new varieties of tree fruits and berries. It has the exclusive rights for the distribution and commercialization of all varieties developed at the Pacific Agri-Food Research Centre in Summerland and Agassiz.
Growers are granted rights to these varieties by PICO, and in return the licensees pay licensing fees and royalties to the 'owner' through PICO.
PICO is owned by the British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association, so it's revenues stay within the grower community.
The problem now is that foreign growers are trying to horn in on the Canadian varieties, without paying the licensing fee. Unchecked, this could drastically undermine the Canadian growers ability to compete on higher priced fruits like Ambrosia apples, Staccato cherries, Saanich raspberries or Stolo strawberries.
"One of the issues we are facing is that the patent laws in the US have changed from belonging to the inventor, to instead belonging to the first person to make the application," Carlson explains. "We now have three patent applications in the US where they have tried to steal our varieties, and it is the same situation in Europe."
PICO is undertaking a multipronged strategy to combat the intellectual property theft of Canadian research and development.
First, Carlson says PICO is arranging to license foreign growers in a variety of countries for very limited plantings of the Canadian varieties; small enough so it doesn't compete with Canadian exports, but large enough to make it worth the local government's time to enforce PICO's licensing rules.
"It is very difficult to protect any variety," Carlson says. "We are working with our partners around the world to ensure that these illegal plantings are not springing up everywhere.
"Yes, there will be some production of our varieties in countries we ship to, but it will be very limited, and we will still be able to ship there."
Secondly, PICO has filed its own patents in the US, Canada and internationally. And thirdly, PICO and PARC are doing DNA fingerprinting on all new varieties developed in Canada. This way, if a competing nation tries to contend it developed a variety, PICO can show that variety was originally developed in Canada. ■