Plant protection authority sets right its potato blunder

A public campaign forced it to revoke registration of PepsiCo’s potato variety, but the agency needs to reset its priorities

- LATHA JISHNU

A CONTROVERSIAL potato variety used to make a global brand of chips is no longer shackled; it is free for cultivation by farmers without the threat of penal action for violating intellectual property rights (IPRS). Nearly four years after PepsiCo India unleashed a series of minatory measures against farmers in Gujarat, an unsavory and unsettling chapter in India’s agriculture has ended with the plant protection authority revoking the registration it had given to PepsiCo’s FL 2027 potato variety (also known as the FC5 variety) used in the manufacture of Lay's chips.

In the process, the authority has indicted itself in no uncertain terms—an unusual occurrence in officialdom—by listing a series of procedural lapses by the registrar, some of them major, in approving the registration despite omissions and fudging in the application submitted by PepsiCo. Perhaps this is the real cause for celebration, if it means the process of registrations at the statutory body, the Protection of Plant Varieties & Farmers' Rights (ppv&fr) Authority, will be more streamlined hereafter.

More important in its revocation judgment is the authority’s affirmation of the overarching spirit of the law, which says the farmer’s interests are supreme. It has accepted a major contention of the revocation petition filed by farm activist Kavita Kuruganti, that the grant of registration was not in the public interest. In other words, something that violates the rights of farmers as enshrined in India’s unique plant protection law is not in the public interest.