Seed Association of Ukraine conducted working meeting on collection of royalties from seeds

Kyiv, Ukraine, March 15, 2017 – Today Seed Association of Ukraine held a meeting on the implementation of the system of collection of royalties on the seed market. The event was attended by the companies-members of the association, representing its working group on royalties; Nicolas Perrin, Advisor on agricultural matters for the Embassy of France in Ukraine; Oleksii Soloviov, Ph.D., attorney-at-law, legal firm Jeantet Ukraine, and Marc Lecrivain, representative of French specialized organization Sicasov, involved in collection and payment of royalties.

The main part of the meeting was devoted to the presentation of Marc Lecrivain. The expert told about the activities of Sicasov in the field of collection and payment of royalties in France. He presented the detailed scheme of work of the organization on all stages, from how companies that produce seed empower Sicasov to collect royalties, and down to how the organization receives and stores information on license agreements, invoices for the royalty amounts and controls their accuracy. One of the interesting features, highlighted by Marc Lecrivain, was that in France the same amount of royalties is collected from different varieties of plants of the same genera and species (the so called Sicasov rate). At the same time, on the seed market of Italy, where Sicasov operates as well, these figures may be different within various varieties of the same plants. According to data provided by the expert, in France cereals provide the biggest sums of the collected royalties (almost two-thirds of the total number of crops). In the context of introducing a system of royalty collection in Ukraine, Marc Lecrivain said that Sicasov is ready to provide the all necessary information support and share its experience in this field.

In his turn, Oleksii Soloviov, the representative of the legal firm Jeantet Ukraine, dedicated his presentation to the current starting conditions for introducing a system of royalty collection in Ukraine.  In particular, he focused on the existing legal acts regulating the activities of the industry in this field, and told in detail about the rights of farmers to use the Farm Saved Seeds, FSS, species that are subject to such farmers’ privilege and the possibility of paying royalties on FSS. When summarizing his presentation, Oleksii Soloviov talked about the possible impact of the final implementation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU on this field.

In its entirety, the meeting on royalty was conducted in the very pro-active working atmosphere. All participants took active part in the discussions and could get answers from experts regarding the issues which resolution could advance introduction of system that would collect royalties from seeds in Ukraine.