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Summary
The fragmented ownership of rights to intellectual property (IP) in agricultural biotechnology leads to situations where no single public-sector institution can provide a complete set of IP rights to ensure freedom to operate with a particular technology. This situation causes obstacles to the distribution of improved staple crops for humanitarian purposes in the developing world and specialty crops in the developed world. This Policy Forum describes an initiative by the major agricultural universities in the United States and other public-sector institutions to establish a new paradigm in the management of IP to facilitate commercial development of such crops.