• recognized the right of breeders to use protected varieties to create new varieties IF NOT ‘essentially derived’ from protected varieties.

• ...to prevent second generation breeders from making merely cosmetic changes to existing varieties in order to claim protection for a new variety. Breeders have been unable to agree on a definition of the minimum genetic distance required for second generation varieties to be treated as not essentially derived from an earlier variety and thus outside of the first breeder’s control.

• Limitation of the farmers’ privilege to save seed for propagating the product of the harvest they obtained by planting a protected variety ‘on their own holdings’, ‘within reasonable limits and subject to the safeguarding of the legitimate interests of the breeder’.

• Unlike the 1978 Act, the 1991 version of the farmers’ privilege does not authorize farmers to sell or exchange seeds with other farmers for propagating purposes.