The EU’s Green Deal is out. It is a new growth strategy that aims decouple economic growth from the use of the resources, transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy with zero net GHG emissions in 2050. The Green Deal is an integral part of the Commission’s strategy to decarbonize the EU economy, implement the 2030 Agenda, achieve the SDGs, and the other priorities announced in President von der Leyen’s political guidelines.
The EU institutions underscore the need for developing deeply transformative policies.
The EU Commission will refocus the European Semester process of macroeconomic coordination to put sustainability and the well-being of citizens at the centre of economic policy, and the SDGs at the heart of the EU’s policymaking and action.
developing countries to facilitate sustainable development, especially in relation to the targets on technology and trade. According to the Report, the IPRs should be geared to each country’s level of development and technological capacities, especially in LDCs, to maximize incentives for innovation to the extent possible within the policy space allowed under the TRIPS Agreement.
There are important areas of tension between efforts to achieve SDGs and some aspects of current IPR protection arrangements. For example, patents for many cutting-edge technologies are held by a handful of multinational enterprises, which thus control a vast proportion of the agricultural inputs market. The need for small-scale farmers to adopt new technologies to remain competitive in global value chains creates a state of dependency on these few companies for inputs, and may also give rise to production bottlenecks unless addressed by competition laws. Agriculture – central to SDG 2, to “end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable driven, and the application of IPRs associated with biotechnology has major implications for food security. The international IPR system for patenting seeds also reinforces the concentration of the agricultural biotechnology sector in a few multinational enterprises, particularly in the seed sector, resulting in an oligopoly in the supply of inputs vital to food security. Therefore, the complex linkages between IPRs and the SDGs suggest that an exclusive focus on increasing standards of IPR protection is not the optimal way forward. Reforming the patent system appears increasingly desirable according to the authors of the Report.
