Preface:
Sow a seed in spring, and heap piles of grains in autumn. Seeds are agriculture’s "chips". The production and sale of fake seeds not only infringes the intellectual property rights of the right owner, harms farmers’ interests, but also endangers China's food security. Our goal is to give consumers confidence about the food their families eat, to conserve resources and sustain the land.
About Corteva®
Corteva® is a publicly traded, global pure-play agriculture company that provides farmers around the world with the most complete portfolio in the industry - including a balanced and diverse mix of seed, crop protection and digital solutions focused on maximizing productivity to enhance yield and profitability. With some of the most recognized brands in agriculture and an industry-leading product and technology pipeline well positioned to drive growth, the company is committed to working with stakeholders throughout the food system as it fulfills its promise to enrich the lives of those who produce and those who consume, ensuring progress for generations to come. Corteva Agriscience became an independent public company on June 1, 2019, and was previously the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont. More information can be found at www.corteva.com.
Corteva’s Brand Protection Journey
In 2017, Corteva China established a new brand protection team. This team is targeting at anti-illegal production and sale of infringing and counterfeit agricultural products, equipped with professionals covering seed and pesticide areas. On one hand, this team serves customers and farmers, collects suspicious leads, handles infringing and counterfeit cases, defends company's production and operation, protects Corteva’s intellectual property rights and interests. On the other hand, it has established smooth communication channels for different level public security bureaus, agricultural departments, and market supervision administration, to provide enforcement agencies and judicial departments with high-quality leads, to share anti-counterfeiting data, which has increased in-depth cooperation with enforcement agencies, and led to a series of successful cases.
On April 28, 2020, the Quality Brand Protection Committee of China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment (QBPC) held the election about ‘Annual Top Ten Cases in Intellectual Property Protection and Model Cases 2019-2020’. This election effectively deters the infringement of brand interests by taking model cases as warning. It has a profound impact on promoting brand protection and healthy business competition, as well as set up positive brand protection examples or bring enlightenment to other right owners. Corteva’s ‘Case of Illegal Operation of Corn Seeds in Qinyang City, Henan Province’ has been voted as one of the top ten intellectual property protection criminal cases among competitors from different industries. This is the third year since Corteva’s brand protection case has been voted as the top ten cases in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.
On March 14, 2019, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People's Republic of China released the "Bulletin of General Office of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on Model Anti-Counterfeiting Cases of Agricultural Products in 2018". In the bulletin, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs announced ten representative cases. One of the case is ‘Wang’s Online Sales of Fake Pesticides Case’ from Nanfeng County Agriculture Bureau of Fuzhou City, Jiangxi Province, which was engaged in fake “Da Sheng" products and supported by Corteva with agriculture department and public security bureau’s enforcement team. On March 30, 2018, the Jincheng Agriculture Bureau of Shanxi Province cracked a case of production and sales of fake corn seeds, which infringed the new plant variety rights of Xianyu 335 of Shandong Denghai Pioneer Co., Ltd., a Corteva affiliate. This case was also announced as ‘Top Ten Anti-Counterfeiting Model Cases of Agricultural Products’ by the Press Office of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The production and sale of fake agricultural products not only severely infringes the intellectual property rights of enterprises, influences the enthusiasm of agriculture innovation, causes significant losses to right owners, but also seriously harms the interests of farmers and endangers China's food security. Corteva’s brand protection team always places farmers’ interests and food security above all while seeking right protection within legal frame.
Brand protection and food safety
Brand is not only the core value of a product or enterprise, but also a discriminator for identifying different products. It is the guarantee of quality and credibility, meanwhile, the reflex ion of economic development of enterprises and regions. If we say that brand building is the foundation of a house, then brand protection is the solid pillar. As a leader in global agriculture, Corteva provides global farmers with greater value and more choices with extensive expertise legally protected.
Brand Protection Sharing
Unique innovation, five-step case mechanism
Intelligence is the pioneer, or let us say, the incubator of cases. How to extract effective intelligence from massive real and fake information, and refine the valuable information among them, is a problem that every brand protector needs to face. In terms of intelligence collection and analysis, Corteva has created a unique five-step case mechanism from data to case. According to the different stages of intelligence development, it is divided into five stages, data, leads, information, intelligence, and case. Through this mechanism, Corteva’s conversion rate from data at beginning stage to case at the end stage has been greatly improved, as well as the intelligence quality. It is a unique innovation in filtering effective intelligence and increasing the success rate of case.
Anti-counterfeiting with big data
China is paying more attention to protecting the intellectual property rights of agricultural products, and enterprises are also actively responding to the call of the rural revitalization policy to create new business modes in agriculture. Given the background, digitalized agriculture is growing rapidly, and raised new requirement in online right protection. In face of increasing Internet crimes, Corteva is using QBPC’s bridging advantage and various big-data media platforms, to establish the blacklist of criminals, share infringement database with law enforcement agencies. This cooperation mode helps strengthen the cooperation between law enforcement agencies and right owners, accurately crack down criminal industry chains while improving case efficiency but reducing case cost.
Joint governance and cross-function collaboration mechanism
Corteva brand protection team has established a cross-function collaboration mechanism with business team, government affairs, legal, security and other teams within company. Compared with some traditional anti-counterfeiting type, Corteva is committed to strengthen brand protection by improving interaction and cooperation with other function team or business team. Customer-focus, comprehensive measures, multiple protection methods, active interaction with other departments, all these work helps Corteva expand the resources and influence of brand protection.
Brand protection empowers business
Brand is very important to business as one of the core values. Enterprises usually need long-term operation and huge investment both in manpower and material resources before they eventually build up product image and reputation. On the other hand, counterfeiters often try to achieve big profit with very low cost or nothing. Once a company’s popular products are targeted by counterfeiters, the quality and safety issues of fake products will seriously damage the brand’s reputation built for years of painstaking efforts, as well as consumers’ safety and business development. Brand protection has become an important engine to create business prosperity and support brand growth, demonstrating a huge driving force. Corteva's brand protection team works closely with business team through a direct interaction window, which clearly identifies business needs in case strategy, efficiently communicates and works together with business team for co-governance in anti-counterfeiting.
In the anti-counterfeiting efforts of agricultural products, Corteva not only starts from the protection of the company’s new plant variety rights, but also highlights the protection of farmers’ interests. While improving the business environment for agricultural products in anti-counterfeiting work, it also gives full play to Corteva’s social responsibilities.