New Issue Brief Examines Who Owns and Who Benefits from Plant Genetic Data in Crop Breeding

The Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at Vermont Law and Graduate School has published “Digital Sequence Information on Plants: Who Owns It, and Who’s Owed?” an issue brief examining how international bodies are debating the governance of plant genetic resources used in crop breeding, particularly as those resources are digitized and shared through online databases.

For thousands of years, farmers and plant breeders have relied on physical plant materials to develop crops with desirable traits like higher yield, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. But since the first whole-plant genome was sequenced and published in 2000, thousands of plant genomes have been sequenced and uploaded to databases. For many plant resources, this “digital sequence information” (DSI) has the potential to replace the physical plant in plant breeding research. While DSI is easier to share, it’s much harder to track, which means it can be used to develop commercial products without the knowledge or consent of the people who contributed most to the plant’s development.

This raises the difficult questions of who owns the data, how to govern intellectual property derived from it, and what compensation is owed when the data on these plant resources is used.

“The international agreements we have for sharing plant genetic resources were already struggling to deliver on their goals of conservation and fairness in research when those resources were seeds and plant materials, which are much easier to track,” said Paulina Jenney. “Though the United States hasn’t ratified all the relevant agreements, researchers here are major users of DSI. This resource is intended as a starting point for understanding and contributing to the ongoing discussion.”

Under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), parties established the “Cali Fund” in 2024 in which large companies that benefit from DSI can choose to contribute a share of their profits or revenue. At least half of these contributions are reserved for Indigenous peoples and local communities. Under the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) creates a system for accessing a defined list of certain crops for research and breeding, with a share of commercial revenue going to a common fund.

The debates are far from settled. At the CBD’s 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17) in Armenia later this month, countries will discuss whether Cali Fund contributions should be mandatory and how these funds would be distributed to countries and communities of origin. ITPGRFA discussions around DSI stalled in 2025, with decisions postponed until November 2027. Meanwhile, The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced a $180 million investment to sequence the plant resources in its National Plant Germplasm System, which currently houses more than 16,000 species.

This brief was authored by Paulina Jenney of Seedhead Strategies, in partnership with Kristina (Kiki) Hubbard of Seedhead Strategies and Emily Spiegel and Haley Rowlands at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems.

Read the full brief at cafs.vermontlaw.edu/resource-library/digital-sequence-information-on-plants.