Regime Tension in the Intellectual Property Rights Arena: Farmers' Rights and Post-TRIPS Counter Regime Trends

Recognizing the transitions that have occurred in the global intellectual property arena since the TRIPS Agreement, this article identifies and examines key sites of the counter regime trends in intellectual property rights with a focus on farmers' rights. It invokes farmers' rights to highlight the conceptual and juridicalhurdles facing the new issue-linkages that propel attempts to redress the shortcomings of the TRIPS' trade-centred approach to intellectual property. The author argues that the existingjuridical framework for farmers 'rights,especiallyunder the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), although inchoate, is stymied and not competent to realize the expectations underlying those rights. The notion of farmers' rights would be better promoted under the canopy of the more unifying framework of other post-TRIPS counter-regime trends, especially the protection of the bio-cultural knowledge of indigenous and local communities, pursuant to the framework Convention on Biological Diversity.