Complexité des communs et régimes de droits de propriété : le cas des ressources génétiques animales

Abstract

Animal breeds are intangible resources created and maintained by selection activities aimed a ?genetic progress?, and they are continuously transformed as a result of these activities and farming practices. Animal breeds (at least for cattle and sheep) have a status of common ownership. The way these common resources are managed, and the genetic progress is generated, controlled and distributed, is based in different national and historical contexts on ?breeding regimes?, made up of rules and political, scientific, informational, technical and organizational devices. Bundles of property rights analytical framework proposed by Schlager and Ostrom [1992] is implemented to distinguish these regimes, considering first the one that is structured in the?1960s in France with the support of the national policy of modernization of agriculture, then the one which today results of recent developments in scientific and technical knowledge, in the context of liberalization of agricultural policies. Each of these regimes got institutionalized in the context of technological breakthroughs: artificial insemination for the first one and genomic selection for the second one. In this article, we analyse the complexity of common resources systems and the evolution of the property rights applied to the case of animal genetic resources and the industry of livestock selection in agriculture. In our analysis of bundle of rights, we add a right of contribution, taking into account the definition of collective breeding objectives aiming at changing the breed?s orientation (leading to an ?alteration? of the breed). While only one breeding organism used to have the monopoly of this right for each breed, it is now threatened by the more competitive emerging regime. The economic stakes are different at each of the two periods.