b'thrive as a business there needed to be intellectual property (IP) protection in place. When you create or you innovate, the upfront cost to develop that innovation, or creation, is very, very high, its very expensive, it takes resources, it takes effort, it takes time, and it takes investment. But in the absence of IP protection, when you release it into the marketplace, the cost to reproduce that innovation is very low. Someone else can reproduce that variety and freeride off of your innovation, explains Parker.Internationally, the Netherlands was the leader in PBR, with other European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and France following suite, and later the United States and Australia. When Canada first joined the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), they were at a lower level of protection called UPOV 1978, later upping their membership to UPOV 1991a stronger form of IP protection. Potato breeders Robert and Joyce Coffin of Privar Farms.PHOTO: PRIVAR FARMSThe minute we did that, we started to see greater amounts of foreign direct investment in Canada and plant breeding, Parker says. For the potato industry, we started to see an increase in the number of foreign varieties coming into Canada, because foreign breeders now had confidence that they could successfully protect innovation when they bring it into the Canadian marketplace.The ushering in of PBR also meant changes for the AAFC potato breeding program variety releases. Prior to UPOV, AAFC would finish all varieties, seeing them through to commercialization. After PBR came into effect, AAFC started the accelerated release program, where varieties were offered to the industry to test at different stages with the companies having the option to license them at the end.After about 20 years of that program, we started to re-evaluate its effectiveness. And so thats when we started the modernization of the program to be better connected with the end user, De Koeyer explains. To allow us to get better feedback from the industry onA HZPC technician checks the development of potato blooms to determine if they are ready to what they like. have the pollen collected from them.PHOTO: HZPC8SPUDSMART.COM Summer 2022'