Slowly, international relations and political science scholars have recognised that intellectual property (IP) rights are not just a legal specialist area but a field of intense conflict at the national as well as the international level. Recent research has enhanced our knowledge about the history and the function of IP rights and has elucidated the power politics behind the remarkable expansion of these rights since the 1980s. Felipe Amin Filomeno's book about the differing patterns of IP protection in the soybean industry in South America makes an important contribution to this growing body of research.

Filomeno presents a comparative case study of the development of IP regulations related to soybean production in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. He sets out to ‘challenge the major theoretical perspectives’ (p. 3) about the development of IP regimes, arguing that neither the realist nor the functionalist perspective provides a convincing explanation of the three countries’ IP regimes. They are neither the result of rational rule-making following national interests, the realist perspective, nor do they provide the right balance between securing profits and incentivising innovation, as a functionalist perspective would suggest. Instead, Filomeno argues that the IP regimes regulating soybean production in South America should be interpreted as the result of the structures of transnational competition between soybean producers on the one hand and three sets of national-level factors on the other, namely the relationship between the state and soybean producers, patterns of competition in the seed industry, and patterns of mobilisation among soybean farmers. With regard to the relationship between state and soybean producers, Filomeno focuses mainly on the size of the soybean agricultural sector and its contribution to the country's tax base. His main concern regarding competition is to what degree local production capacities counter Monsanto's hegemony and, in terms of mobilisation, he is mainly interested in the structure and stability of soybean farmers’ organisations and their ability to communicate their claims to the broader public.

The three cases provide for an interesting comparison because Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have widely varying rules and implementations governing IP rights relevant for the soybean industry. Of the three countries, Argentina has the most permissive system of IP rights regulating the sale and cultivation of soybeans. It is the only country in which Monsanto did not succeed in establishing a private royalty collection system in addition to the public system of patents and breeders’ rights. Brazil has created much stronger IP rights establishing exclusive rights for plant breeders and the seed industry. This may be surprising at first, because Brazil has, at the international level, often been an outspoken critic of the policies of the United States and other countries from the Global North to create ever more expanding IP rights. But it makes much more sense if one considers that in Brazil the profits from stronger IP rights on plant varieties accrue not only to Monsanto and other multinational firms but also to the state-owned Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, which actively develops genetically modified soybeans adapted to Brazil's climatic conditions. Paraguay, finally, has strong IP rights, weak enforcement but a highly profitable private royalty collection system for Monsanto, as a result of a weak state, divided farmers’ interests and lack of domestic research and production capabilities. Drawing on Ken Shadlen's research on pharmaceutical patents in South America Filomeno classifies the three countries’ IP policies as developmental, neo-developmental and dependent.

To support his general argument, Filomeno presents three very detailed case studies in which he examines the three countries’ IP policies since the 1970s. In these he describes the development (or in some cases rather non-development) of IP protection for soybeans. These case studies offer a very rich source of detailed knowledge about local actors and their positions and about the course of various legislative processes related to IP rights in respect of genetically modified organisms and plant varieties. This level of detail is certainly a strength of the book but it is also the source of its major weakness. In the detailed description and the plethora of organisational acronyms the author loses sight of the broader developments. The book discusses existing and proposed laws next to directives and resolutions from various institutions and organisations without providing sufficient guidance for the reader who is not familiar with the respective national institutional and policy-specific settings. Instead of a description of every proposed legal and regulatory change concerning IP rights relevant for soybean production, I would have liked to see a more aggregated and summarising discussion of emerging and changing coalitions and their major lines of argumentation, and more information about the actual effects of the regulations. A link is missing between the author's broad generalisations in terms of developmental models and decisive factors for the breadth and scope of agricultural IP protection in each country and the very detailed level of description in the case studies.

Furthermore, a section explaining the interaction between the two major systems of IP rights for agricultural production, plant breeders’ rights and patents would have been helpful. How do patents that protect every use of a patented plant variety interact with breeders’ rights that allow farmers to save a certain amount of their harvest for re-sowing? What are the differences between the two UPOV conventions from 1978 and 1991?

In the end, I learned a lot from reading the book, even though doubts remain as to whether the author's generalisations really explain the differences between the three countries’ IP systems for agricultural products. In particular, I'm not convinced by his final claim that strong institutional and economic links between the state and knowledge users on the one hand, and a strong mobilisation of knowledge users on the other, would be a necessary condition for a permissive IP regime, while weak institutional and economic links and weak mobilisation of knowledge users would be a necessary condition for a restrictive IP regime. Methodologically three cases provide a very small data pool for such a sweeping generalisation. But more importantly this argument ignores the fact that the more permissive law in Argentina is much older than the legal frameworks in Brazil and Paraguay. The difference may thus – at least in addition to the identified mechanism – result from a path dependency and the fact that changing an existing law can sometimes be much harder than creating a new law because an established legal framework also creates stable advocacy coalitions which will resist attempts to change the status quo.