This book is an attempt to adumbrate the challenge to be faced by the new 21st century Intellectual property’ agenda in dealing with the complexities linked to intellectual property in traditional knowledge, community knowledge and animate objects.

In recent years the issue of control over resources themselves have been superseded by questions concerning bio-diversity related knowledge and invention. In the present major legal systems/IPR regimes, farmers, local communities and other managers of bio-diversity are not given IPR to their knowledge. In exchange the concept of benefit sharing has been introduced as a via-media in a bid to recognize the contribution of these actors while usually denying them property rights.

This is a humble attempt to enquire into the jurisprudence of ‘Traditional knowledge’ of the farming community (especially where farming is a livelihood and not a commercial activity) which is considered to be a prior art or raw material upon which the MNCs apply genetic engineering and obtain patents. The author has tried to explore the possibility of empowering the farmers with IPR to their centuries old knowledge.