Global IP law and local politics: The political economy of African seed business law

The World Trade Organisation has promoted Western-styled intellectual property (IP) norms around the world. This IP-related endeavours can be seen as part of a global move in the direction of less state and more private entrepreneurship. Whereas some ‘orthodox’ development scholars have welcomed the turn towards market institutions in development policy, other ‘critical’ development scholars have argued that Western IP norms are ill-suited to the needs of developing countries, especially in the agricultural sector. Both orthodox and critical scholars have two blind spots in their research. On the one hand, they have focused on emerging economies and extrapolated their findings about ‘neoliberal’ policy prescriptions towards the rest of the developing world. The poorest African countries have been manifestly understudied. On the other hand, there is a problematic lack of data on how the law works on a day-to-day basis.

My PhD aims to contribute towards filling these geographical and empirical gaps. I specifically look at the implementation in Africa of ‘seed business law’: patent law on agrobiotechnology, plant variety protection law and seed legislation. My argument is that seed business law is not supporting multinational seed companies to the extent usually assumed, but is rather locally adapted to the interests of domestic elites (politicians, bureaucrats, traditional leaders, landlords, businessmen, army, traders etc.). These interests, part of the local political economy, sometimes revolve around clientelistic redistribution via patronage networks, which results in separate circuits of capital accumulation. Accordingly, seed business law is to a large extent disused (not implemented) and to some extent dysfunctional (working towards goals other than the ones for which it was designed).

In addition to a broad desktop study including statistics and legal sources, I conduct interview-based comparative case studies of seed business law vis-à-vis rice in Senegal and cotton in Burkina Faso. Senegal and Burkina Faso have the same legal framework for seed business law, but different political economies. Accordingly, comparing the two countries allows to isolate the effects of political economy on the use of seed business law. I link my fieldwork findings to the development studies literature. I argue that legal scholars should scrutinize domestic elites when researching the effects of international legal norms on development in Africa.