New IP protection to spur crop innovation

China formally launched a new intellectual property protection system for plant breeding on Monday, aiming to encourage original breeding innovation and strengthen the country's drive to develop high-quality crop varieties for food security.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announced the first list of crops covered by China's agricultural Essentially Derived Variety system, marking the official implementation of the framework after receiving State Council approval.

Under the new rules, if a breeder uses an existing protected crop variety to create a slightly modified version — known as an essentially derived variety — they must obtain authorization from the original owner before commercializing it. This creates a legal mechanism for both parties to share commercial benefits.

An essentially derived variety is an upgraded version of an existing crop. For example, a researcher might improve a popular, high-yielding rice variety by adding resistance to a specific disease while leaving nearly all of its other traits identical. Under the new system, the upgraded variety would still recognize the IP rights of the breeder who created the original foundation crop.

Developing a completely new crop variety typically takes eight to 10 years and requires significant financial investment, according to Yang Haisheng, deputy head of the ministry's Department of Seed Industry. Without legal protection, breeders who make only minor modifications could profit without rewarding original innovators, undercutting motivation for long-term research.

Wan Jianmin, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chairman of the national crop variety approval committee, said breeders have long awaited such a system.

In the past, the lack of protection led many organizations to focus on quick, minor tweaks rather than true innovation, while foundation breeders received little return for years of hard work. Over the long term, the system will shift China's seed industry away from simply pursuing more crop varieties toward developing better ones, Wan added.

The first implementation catalog covers 10 major crops: rice, wheat, cotton, rapeseed, peanut, Chinese cabbage, chili pepper, foxtail millet, broad bean and peach.

Yang said these crops were selected because they represent critical food, oilseed, vegetable, fruit and fiber crops with active breeding programs, rich genetic resources, and mature DNA testing and field-identification tools needed to prove whether one variety was derived from another.

By the end of 2025, applications for plant variety rights covering these 10 crops had reached 38,600, accounting for more than one-third of all agricultural plant variety applications in China, according to the ministry.

Liu Lihua, head of the Department of Seed Industry and head of the office for the protection of new plant varieties, emphasized that innovation is vital for seed industry revitalization and that stronger IP protection provides a direct incentive for further breeding breakthroughs.

The measure comes as China continues ramping up efforts to strengthen its domestic seed industry to ensure national food security.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Zhang Zhu recently noted that more than 95 percent of China's crop varieties are now independently developed. Domestic varieties also account for more than 91 percent of the vegetable seed market, over 80 percent of livestock breeds and 86 percent of aquatic breeding stock.

China will continue using biotechnology and artificial intelligence to accelerate the breeding of high-yield, disease-resistant and climate-resilient varieties while strengthening intellectual property protection to achieve greater self-reliance in seed technology, Zhang stressed.