Specific analysis on the judgment of RESP n°1.610.728/RS – Sojicultores x Monsanto

Abstract

The subject addressed here is possibly one of the most thorny and incipient in Law with regard to research, studies and discussions, mainly due to some loopholes and pitfalls in patent legislation, for example, articles 42, II and 43. The 2nd section of the STJ concluded judgment of IAC (nº4) - Incident of Assumption of Jurisdiction - which dealt with an intellectual property issue involving the cultivation of transgenic soy, having, on one side, rural producers’ unions and, on the other, the multinational Monsanto. The lawsuit debated the possibility of granting simultaneous protection – by the invention patent and cultivar protection institutes – to transgenic Roundup Ready (RR) soybean seeds, and whether or not rural producers are entitled to reserve the product of its cultivation for replanting and commercialization as food and raw material, as well as the right of small farmers to donate or exchange seeds reserved in the context of specific special programs. There are many requests analyzed and debated in their technicality that are extremely controversial and dubious when interpreted by the Courts, precisely because of the lack of conceptualization and practical delimitation between what is biological and what is technical, what is microbiological, which is potentially harmful to the environment, among other issues of a political, economic and ideological nature, as well as the training of the magistrate who is an operator of the law and not an expert in biotechnology or biology. We need to continue to discuss the topic and its feasibility for the country, as well as propose urgent changes to some articles of the patent law, since it is a matter of public interest with enormous socioeconomic repercussions and deleterious effects on the right to food and national agriculture itself. Not agreeing with some premises of the judgment, we argue that an urgent review is necessary. We hope that this research will be useful to leverage the necessary discussions around the topic. The method used was the explanatory deductive method in order to analyze the judgment in question according to the legislation relevant to the case. This is what we intend in the present study