Colombia is one of the countries that has a system for the protection of the Plant Breeder's Rights, wherein protection is granted to people or entities that discovered the new plant, by issuing a breeder's certificate, which in Colombia is territorial.

Specifically, plant breeder’s rights are Intellectual Property rights granted on new plant varieties developed by a person or a legal entity through hybrid or biotechnology procedures, genetic modifications, regeneration process of the plants from transformed cells, or any other. 

In fact, for Colombia, the main reason for this protection is based on the fact that breeders' rights are useful tools for the generation of a new income for farmers, a greater production of food, as well as motivating research to develop new plants.

Hence, with the aim of recognizing the effort of these technological advances, in our country, the entity that exercises the technical-scientific control to recognize and guarantee the protection of new plant breeder’s rights is the Colombian Agricultural and Livestock Institute (ICA), who grants a breeder's certificate to guarantee the exclusive exploitation of the plant for a period of 20 to 25 years for the case of vines, forest trees, fruit trees including their rootstocks, and 15 to 20 years for the remaining species.   

Furthermore, as in other Intellectual Property protection figures, there are requirements that must be met by plants, such as that they must be characterized by being novel, distinguishable, homogeneous, and stable. Hence, according to the Legislation about Protection of the Plant Breeder’s rights issued by the ICA:

• A plant will be considered new if the reproduction or multiplication material, or a product of its harvest, has not been sold or otherwise delivered to third parties;
• A plant will be considered different, if it differs clearly from any other whose existence is commonly known, to the date of presentation of the application or to the priority date;
• A plant shall be considered homogeneous if it is sufficiently uniform in its essential features, considering the foreseeable variations according to its form of reproduction, multiplication or propagation;
•  A variety will be considered stable if its essential characters remain unchanged from generation to generation and at the end of each particular cycle of reproductions, multiplications or propagations.