Agriculture: Lomé hosts OAPI workshop focused on boosting yield by developing new crop varieties

Agriculture
Wednesday, 20 January 2021 15:45
Agriculture: Lomé hosts OAPI workshop focused on boosting yield by developing new crop varieties

(Togo First) - Last Monday, a workshop was held in Lomé to train agricultural experts from the member States of the African Organization for Intellectual Property. The focus of the workshop was new plant varieties and it aimed to boost agricultural yield and production. 

Themed Technical Assessment for the Distinction, Homogeneity, and Stability of new plant varieties, the meeting is to last five days. It should enable producers from the OAPI to get quality seedlings, subsequently boosting their productivity. 

The initiative supports African farmers cultivating food crops like maize, rice, and sorghum, and cash crops also. The OAPI wants to help researchers develop “new varieties that will resist climate change, and produce better yield, therefore boosting output; this requires that we change production techniques, said Guy Francis BOUSSAFOU, Director of patents and other technical creations. 

Lastly, the workshop’s goal is to protect the work of researchers from the OAPI’s member-States. This, according to the director-general of the national institute for intellectual property and technology (INPIT),  Mnanta Komi LAMATETOU, “will reassure the researchers regarding their investment, since they will have exclusivity to produce and sell the crop varieties for 25 years.”

“In Togo, the researcher who develops a variety brings samples to the INPIT”, LAMATETOU says, “and submits an application for a patent which is then sent to the OAPI.”

In all, there are 17 people being trained at the workshop and 3 experts from the OAPI.

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