The UK Plant Breeding Sector and Innovation

Abstract

A few studies have tried to understand plant breeding activity but only a handful of these are up-to-date studies focused on the UK.

The main questions addressed by this report are to:

identify the economic contribution of commercial plant breeding

plot the current structure of commercial plant breeding in the UK and also the structural and economic barriers for conducting a plant breeding programme

to understand how innovation occurs within plant breeding and to look at how intellectual property rights are currently used