CONCLUSION

It is a challenge to give a presentation today characterised "as a conclusion" in your programme. After having a look at your programme and after reading the summaries of the presentations made during this week, my first conclusion is that you must be rather tired and in the process of digesting all the information you have received during this week. Information related to the subject of this week symposium on the Improvement of Ornamental plants.

During this week, experts have tried to give an answer on questions like: how plants are built, how molecular markers can be used for ornamental breeding, and more general, how genetic engineering and other modern techniques can be used in the process of plant breeding.

I hope that the answers given, will stimulate you to continue with new enthusiasm your activities in the plant breeding sector. Activities that will result, I hope, in new and better performing ornamental varieties.

Plant breeding is time and money consuming. Breeders and breeding companies need a return on the investments made in order to be able to continue their breeding activity. The basis of an adequate financial remuneration for breeders can be found in an effective protection by means of an intellectual property right of the commercially exploitable results of breeding new varieties of plants.

It is clear that as President of the Community Plant Variety Office, managing the Community plant variety rights system, I may not be regarded as an entirely objective source of information. Aware of this, I nevertheless venture to answer this question with the following statement:

Plant variety rights UPOV type, as offered by the CPVO on a European scale, give effective protection for new plant varieties, whether they are the result of traditional breeding or of modern breeding techniques (biotechnology). Other types of protection, in this respect only patent and trademark protection are relevant, can, at least in the European situation, only be complementary to plant variety rights protection.

To give a basis to this statement, I will explain the main elements of the said system. Furthermore I will give some information in respect of the other intellectual property right systems just mentioned.

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