Food patents are everywhere but as more of our food comes out of labs, they could soon dominate everything we consume: Intellectual property rights have for many years guided the production of a sizable portion of the foods we consume every day. Unsurprisingly, control over agricultural production has largely rested in the hands of a few major corporations. With tech-enhanced foods like lab-grown meats or plant based meat alternatives set to grow in popularity over the coming years, the rush to declare intellectual property over food could reach a higher tempo.

Intellectual property in food is nothing new: About three decades ago when genetically modified foods first entered mainstream foodsystems, corporations like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow Dupont (whose agriculture division has become Corteva Agriscience) and Syngenta started snapping up patents for large swaths of high-yielding crop varieties and eventually came to control most of the world’s seeds. What that ultimately meant was that companies who supposedly owned these seed varieties (genetically modified or not) were given the right to restrict how farmers use their seeds and could bar them from trading or replanting them in the future in the absence of a formal agreement.

It sounds a little shady, but it’s all legit: World Trade Organization (WTO) member states are often required to enforce some level of intellectual property protection on certain plant varieties. Many of them are doing so by becoming signatories to the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) which is designed to regulate seed production and exchange. There are currently some 13.3k patented plant species worldwide, up from just 120 in 1990, according to European initiative No-Patents-On-Seeds.

There are countless examples of large corporations going after farmers who’ve allegedly violated these IP rules: PepsiCo in 2019 infamously sued a number of Indian farmers for growing a potato variety the company claimed had infringed upon its patent for a specifically designed crop used by its subsidiary, Lays. Though the company eventually settled the case, they had initially sought out some USD 143k for the alleged infringement. Closer to home, a court in Beni Suef earlier this year ruled against an 11-acre farm for unlawfully growing a variety of Israeli-bred and Cypriot-owned grapes called Early Sweet and ordered the removal of the some 9k trees growing the fruit. Other farmers in Alexandria, Cairo, and Tanta were also recently handed down court verdicts ruling against them growing an IP-protected type of grape known commercially as Sugrathirteen.

Proponents of tighter IP protections in food production claim that it helps drive innovation: Corporations like Monsanto often argue that these patents are crucial for funding new innovations in agriculture, which can sometimes run up to “mns of USD every day in research and development,” the company told DW in a statement in 2019. “For every USD 10 a farmer spends on seeds, Monsanto re-invests USD 1 in research and development,” it said. These are the kinds of innovations that offer higher yield or heat resistant crops.

But there are some serious risks with intellectual property restrictions applied to this industry: One of the biggest problems with these patents is that biodiversity in agriculture becomes dangerously restricted. Farmers planting a diverse mix of crops are usually better positioned to overcome threats like disease and changing weather patterns than those with entirely uniform crops, according to a UN report (pdf).

There’s also the issue of increasingly concentrated power and how it threatens food security: There’s a serious food security problem presented by "the oligopolistic structure of the input providers," who increasingly hold power over food prices, the UN report says. Currently some 50% of the global seed market is in the hands of Bayer-Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta and the size of this sector is anticipated to reach USD 90 bn by 2024.

These same fears are present in the next generation of tech-enabled food production: Food companies like Singaporean Eat Just or the Bill Gates-backed Memphis Meats are part of a new generation of meat producers that rarely ever have to set foot in a field. These are producers who have set out to make low-carbon animal protein using stem cells from actual animal tissue with the promise of a more sustainable future for food production — which would be a welcome step for driving down global food emissions. But underlying most of these initiatives, is a mad dash to secure patents that could provide them a huge competitive advantage in future food systems.

The problem here is that once the world bites, new titans of industry will be born: If (or when) the world adopts lab-grown meat on a much wider scale we could find ourselves at the whims of a few companies who’ve patented their technologies for our food needs, with few legal alternatives to turn to. This could end up becoming a scenario that mirrors what has been unfolding with major agricultural producers over the last three decades. And if the world develops an appetite for lab-grown meats we could be looking at even fewer hands controlling our global food supply.