While IPR protection for plant material has been a political issue in industrialized countries since the beginning of the 20th century, it is rather new for developing countries. Until the 1990s, the absence of legal protection for plant varieties in developing countries was not considered a real impediment to trade by transnational breeding firms. The industry exported hybrid seeds or relied on seed quality marketed under a trademark, or relied on contracts when it licensed out the multiplication of plant varieties. In anticipation of possible losses due to the lack of legal protection, transnational breeding firms often demanded higher royalty rates than in industrialized countries. Major complaints were however heard by the flower industry. Vegetatively propagated flowers are too easily reproduced and breeders lost considerable amounts of royalties. As a response, they avoided sending their latest and most valuable plant varieties to developing countries, but this is not a lasting solution.

Globalisation has increased the pressures on developing countries to introduce intellectual property protection, initially in the fields of copyright on music, games and movies and of industrial and specifically pharmaceutical products and processes. A primary purposer of such pressures is to fight so-called parallel imports in countries where the right holders had their biggest markets. In response to the private intellectual property lobby campaign the White House, in the early 1980s, announced a new policy on intellectual property, while U.S. Congress passed into law a series of amendments to the U.S. Trade Act. In doing so, Congress made adequate IPR protection a condition for foreign countries to have trading and investment relations with the USA.
This development coincided with another development which started in the USA. Biotechnological research in the industrial sector produced novel living organisms, which put the US patent system in a difficult position. In 1980, Mr. Chakrabarty won a famous case in the U.S. Supreme Court which established that U.S. patents could be granted on a genetically engineered micro-organism. Until then, patents on life forms were not possible, and several countries had instead developed a weaker form of IPR for agricultural use: the USA introduced plant patents in 1930 for vegetatively propagated crops only; European countries developed plant variety protection for any crop in the 1940s (and adopted in the USA in 1970 for seed crops only). The biotechnological patents from the industrial sector were quickly used in plant breeding and two IPR systems - patents and breeder's rights - converged. It must be borne in mind that IPRs are strictly territorial in scope (i.e. national and in some regions regional patents can be obtained such as in Europe and in West Africa. Protection is granted within the borders of a nation and different countries may have slightly different rules. The developments in the USA had however a far-reaching effect in that other states followed the changing interpretation to a greater or lesser extent.

From the plant breeding perspective, one can thus say that the IPR-environment swiftly changed during last two decades: they extended to more countries and strengthened in scope and rights.