Against Intellectual Monopoly

productivity
to reveal the impact of extended patentability in agriculture. To mark the progress of innovation in agriculture, one may want to focus on specific
species of plants, in which case corn, as a common and important crop, may
be a useful case study. We show in the subsequent figure crop yields for U.S.
corn, averaged by decade.12

    Up until the 1930s, yields did not change much - as the specialized
literature we mention in the notes explains, this turns out to have little to do
with lack of innovation. It is primarily because as agriculture moved west,
into poorer climates and soil, continuous innovation was required just to
maintain crop yields. As the area under cultivation stabilized, beginning in
the 1930s and especially in the 1950s, crop yields exploded. The primary
innovations underlying this explosion were the introduction of improved
hybrid varieties that are more responsive to heavy fertilization.
    The key point is that the bulk of the growth in yield took place when
patents on plant life were impossible or rare and certainly did not apply to
corn, which is not asexually reproduced. Indeed, patents on corn hybrids
became widespread only after DNA-based research began. Pioneer-Hi-Bred
International recorded the first such patent on corn in 1974, after most
of the growth in yield reported in the figure had already taken place.13
The large surge in the patenting of corn varieties occurred in the period 1974-84 - substantially after the revolution in crop yield was well under way.
In fact, the growth rate in corn yield seems to have decreased since the 1980s!

Spanish Hortalezas and Italian Maglioni
    Introducing high-tech greenhouse to grow fruits and vegetables in Almeria,
Spain, in the early 1960s (the "hortalezas" of the title) was as much an
economic innovation as the development of the 286 microprocessor in California two decades later. It took place through the effort of a large number of
completely unknown farmers and in the absence of any patent protection of
the business methods and production techniques they created or adopted.14
    In 1963, Almeria was such a poor and desert area that Sergio Leone went
there to shoot his spaghetti westerns. The area was no less desolate than are
Arizona and Southern Utah, but the region was so poor that it was a lot
cheaper to make a film there. Shortly after that, the first greenhouse, a simple
and low-cost pergola-type structure, gave birth to the so-called Almerian
miracle. The consequences ofthis innovation are so profound that the results
can even be seen from space: the NASA satellite images herein, show Almeria
before and after the miracle.15 (See color plate on next page.) A picture is
really worth more than a thousand words: we cannot imagine a better way
to show how innovation under competition can improve in a short period
of time people's economic conditions.

    A similar, if less visually stunning, revolution happened at about the same
time in the area around Treviso, Italy, when the members of the Benetton
family introduced the ready-to-color sweater (maglione) production process and adopted creative franchising techniques that in a couple of decades
transformed a large segment of the clothing sector.16 Both their original
production process and their marketing and distribution methods were
rapidly imitated, and improved, first by competitors from the same area
and then by competitors from all kinds of faraway places. The megastores of
Zara and H&M, which attract hordes of shoppers everywhere in the world,
are, until now, the most recent stage of the innovation-cum-imitation process that Benetton started forty years ago in a poor area of the Italian
Northeast.
    Each of these economic innovations was costly, took place without "intellectual property," and was quickly imitated; thus, the innovations not only
brought fortune to their original creators but also led to widespread economic changes in the geographical areas and the economic sectors harboring
the initial innovation. In the cases of Almeria and Treviso, the innovationcum-imitation process was so deep and so persistent that it spilled over
to other sectors, leading to a continued increase in productivity that, in a
few decades, turned two relatively underdeveloped areas into some of the
richest provinces of Spain and Italy, respectively. Indeed, the social value of
an innovation is maximized when it spreads rapidly, and by spurring