The hectares nobody counted, and the value they quietly drain
A variety often scales faster in the channels nobody licensed than in the ones that did. The cost is not only lost royalty; it is a market planning on numbers that are quietly wrong.
Most variety owners think of unauthorised planting as a missing royalty: someone grew the variety, nobody paid, that is the loss. The real damage is larger and stranger than that. The hectares nobody counted do not just skip a fee. They quietly corrupt the production data the entire market plans on, and they crash the price for the growers who paid to do it properly.
This is worth understanding as a market problem before it is treated as a legal one, because the legal response only works once you grasp what is actually leaking.
The numbers the market plans on are missing a piece
Global planting figures are supposed to tell the industry how much fruit is coming and roughly when. They are also, it turns out, incomplete in a way that is not random. Planting data for a recent year carried an under-counting gap of several thousand hectares between what was recorded and what analysts believe is really in the ground. By some industry estimates, informal plantings in a single Chinese province, Yunnan, account for more than half of that gap on their own.
Sit with what that means. A material share of real, fruit-bearing area is missing from the picture everyone uses to plan production, price and supply. The forecasting is not slightly soft; it is built on a base that is quietly wrong in one direction. Everyone downstream, from the licensee planning volumes to the retailer planning a season, is working from a map with a hole in it.
Unauthorised volume is unprogrammed volume
The licensed model exists partly to coordinate: to manage how much of a variety reaches the market, in what window, at what grade, so the premium holds. Informal plantings break that on purpose by ignoring it. The volume arrives unprogrammed, with no regard for timing or positioning, and it lands on top of the supply the market was expecting.
The people it hurts most are not the owner in the abstract. They are the licensees who paid a premium for proper access and now watch unplanned fruit undercut the price they were promised protection on. That is the quietly corrosive part. Leakage does not only divert a royalty stream; it penalises the growers who did exactly what the model asked of them, and over time it teaches the market that paying for access buys less than it should.
A variety often scales faster in the channels nobody licensed than in the ones that did, and the growers who paid the premium are the ones who feel it.
The choice is not only litigation
Faced with this, the reflex is to reach for enforcement, and sometimes that is right. But it is rarely the first or the cheapest move, and it spends money rather than recovering it. The more commercial path is often legitimisation: bringing the hectares that already exist into a licensed structure, so the planting that was draining value starts contributing it and stops distorting the data.
That is a far more attractive economic outcome than a lawsuit, and it turns a problem into recovered volume. It rests, though, on one thing the owner usually does not have: knowing where the unauthorised plantings actually are. You cannot legitimise, price, or challenge a planting you cannot see, and most leakage runs undisturbed for years precisely because nobody was looking in a structured way.
Where the commercially sharp owners put their attention
The pattern among owners who handle this well is that they treat visibility as the first thing they invest in. Rather than waiting for unprogrammed fruit to show up in a price collapse or a chance sighting, they build a deliberate view of where leakage is most likely to be forming, by variety and by region, and they watch it on purpose. The aim is to stop being surprised, and to know early enough that legitimisation is still on the table. This is the same discipline behind Argus, the monitoring approach we built at Greenstone, though the principle holds with or without a platform.
The leakage will not announce itself. A variety can be scaling faster in the channels nobody licensed than in the ones that did, draining royalty, distorting the data, and punishing the loyal licensee all at once, while the owner sees none of it. And the first move is the simplest one: being able to see the hectares that were always there.
Frequently asked questions
How big can informal plantings actually get?
Bigger than most owners assume, and large enough to bend the numbers the market runs on. Global planting figures for a recent year carried an under-counting gap of several thousand hectares, and by some industry estimates the informal plantings in one Chinese province alone, Yunnan, account for more than half of that gap. When the uncounted area is that material, the official picture everyone plans against is missing a real chunk of supply.
Beyond lost royalties, why should an owner care?
Because the second-order damage is often worse than the missing fee. Unauthorised volume is unprogrammed volume: it lands in the market with no coordination on timing or grade, and it can crash the price for the licensees who paid a premium for proper access. So leakage does not only cost the owner a royalty; it punishes the exact growers who did the right thing, which is corrosive to the whole licensed model.
Is the only response to sue?
Not in our experience, and litigation is rarely the first move. Depending on the situation, the more pragmatic path is often legitimisation: bringing existing unauthorised hectares into a licensed structure so they start paying and stop distorting. That captures value rather than just spending it on enforcement. Whether that works depends heavily on knowing where the plantings are in the first place, which is usually the missing piece.
How would an owner even find unauthorised plantings at scale?
That is the hard part, and it is why so much leakage runs for years. You cannot legitimise or challenge a planting you cannot see. In our view the useful shift is from waiting for the problem to surface by accident to building a deliberate, structured view of where unprogrammed volume is most likely to be appearing, by variety and by region, so you are working from a map rather than a rumour.
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About the author
Tomer Biran, Founder of Greenstone
Tomer Biran is the founder of Greenstone. He has spent more than twenty years on both sides of the table: as a qualified lawyer and former General Counsel to international organisations across multiple jurisdictions, and as a founder and operator of B2B and B2C businesses across the UK, EU, and US. He has served as General Manager of a leading plant breeders' company with a global footprint and as General Counsel of an international fresh produce marketing group. He holds a Master of Law and Business from WHU and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, where he was a Joachim Herz Excellence Scholar, and a Bachelor of Laws. That blend of commercial operating experience and legal depth is what drives Greenstone's commercial-first approach to plant variety rights and commercialisation.
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