Felipe Filomeno's book on intellectual property (IP) regimes and practices in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay makes several important contributions. First, it is at the cutting edge of research on negotiating and implementing intellectual property rights regimes in South America's agribusiness industry. Second, it makes an implicit but compelling case for blurring rigid disciplinary lines between international relations, comparative politics, and international political economy and their major theoretical frameworks. Not one of these alone explains the differences in the approaches of South American countries to transnational pressures for the development of IP regimes on seeds. Third, and this is particularly important for the reader interested in IP regimes but not necessarily familiar with Latin America, the book reveals the profound differences among Latin American countries' politics and policy-making processes.
On this last point, Filomeno works with a comparative theoretical matrix that neatly highlights these differences. In Argentina, a permissive IP regime is influenced by the “corporatist pattern of rule-making, peak-level formal negotiations” between private sector associations and the state. In Brazil, the stronger IP regulatory framework emerges from a pluralist pattern of negotiations between powerful stakeholders both within and outside the state. Interestingly, the strength of IP regulations in Paraguay cannot be similarly explained by pluralist interactions: here, the interests of the powerful rural producing elite prevailed over the autonomy of the state and hold it captive (18–20).
The discussions of the role of the state and state agencies, such as the Brazilian EMBRAPA, a state-funded enterprise and a national leader in agribusiness research and development, is vital for the analysis. Without it, the author's preference for critical approaches in explaining IP regimes (to the detriment of realist and functionalist explanations) would fall short. In keeping the state and its interplay with social and political forces at the center of the analysis, the author avoids a common pitfall of critical and structuralist theories, that is, their deterministic bend.
Filomeno uses Monsanto, the global agricultural giant and seed pioneer, as a proxy for the interests of the “global core” countries in preserving their economic dominance over “periphery” regions through strict IP regimes. The empirical chapters try to strike a balance between the weight of transnational factors (Monsanto's strategies to advance its interest in stricter IP regimes) and the domestic policy-making context. In attempting to preserve this balance, Filomeno is reluctant at times to give full credit to the predominant role that state-society interactions have had in the design of IP regimes, which, it should be noted, has characterized the established democracies in all three countries.
I would suggest that the reader of this book consider, for instance, Fernando H. Cardoso's alert in his 2008 article titled “New Paths: Globalization in a Historical Perspective”: “The standpoint of the structural analysis conditions, but does not determine, the shape taken by economic and political processes [in neoliberal Latin America]. Political strategies of insertion in the global economy have a certain margin of autonomy. . . . The choice among the alternatives and their ultimate success depend as much on the structural basis as on the political capacity of the leadership, and even on the institutions and political culture in the broader sense” (394).
The one significant gap in the book is an insider's perspective on Monsanto's preferences and participation in the formation of different IP seeds regimes in the Southern Cone. Often the subject of corporate controversies and often targeted by transnational campaigns against its corporate practices, Monsanto's resistance to further scrutiny is to be expected, but the researcher has to take this resistance into account as a factor in selecting such a case study. Filomeno's treatment of Monsanto as operating homogenously throughout the world, as if within a “black box,” and the lack of interviews with company officers limit our understanding of how multinational corporations insert themselves in national policy processes. We would wish to learn how they go about seeking allies, framing goals and reframing goals, and even making important concessions, such as the funding of a national research-oriented agricultural and biotechnology institute in Paraguay.
