Food fights are not confined to the Harry Potter's Hogwarts’ school refectory. They now happen on an international scale. For many years as an EU trade negotiator my job was to negotiate trade agreements with other countries, including negotiating deals on agriculture, a sensitive sector for Europe, as the debate over the Mercosur free trade agreement (FTA) shows.
Often, the quid pro quo for agricultural concessions was securing protection for the EU’s iconic food names, its Geographical Indications (GIs).
Names like Feta, Gorgonzola, Porto, Chablis, Prosciutto San Daniele and the like… products which represent 15 percent of the EU’s agrifood exports.
This was not achieved without a 'food fight' with the partner countries: Chile, Mexico, Mercosur, South Africa, New Zealand, others… mostly new world countries whose European diaspora had brought with them some famous appellations of origin when they quit Europe in the nineteenth century or between the wars, to produce in their new found land.
Countries whose producers understandably opposed Europe’s demands that they cease using these old world names on their wines, cheeses or hams.
At the outset of negotiations, many of the EU’s partners were therefore reluctant to negotiate geographical indicators, leaving decisions to the final stages of the FTA deal, to be put in the mix with bigger issues (beef, cars, dispute settlement, commitments on climate, patent protection, etc).
A subject of quite modest economic importance took on massive political importance because GIs are emotional — they are about the bread of life, culture, heritage and identity in a way that trade marks or patents decidedly are not.
The US — which has its own dairy diaspora — put massive political pressure on the EU’s partners during its FTA negotiations to stop Europe from securing exclusive protection of its GI names.
The US attack, led by the US Dairy Export Council, Kraft Foods, and a US government-funded lobby group the Consortium on Common Food Names (CCFN), which included also Australian and other dairy groups, largely failed.
For three reasons.
One, many of the EU’s FTA partners over recent years started to realise that GIs are a great pro-development tool, stimulating rural economies, putting more supply-chain money into farmers’ pockets, and being the poster child for food export drives.
Countries like Chile, Brazil, Japan (with its growing food and wine exports), switched from being GI sceptics to GI fans. The UN World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), in charge of international property rights treaties, similarly became a convert, seeing GIs as a good entry point to persuade developing countries to prioritise IPR protection as part of their economic growth strategies.
Two, the EU's offer in agriculture was attractive to trading partners. Protecting Europe’s iconic names despite local or US opposition was a reasonable price to pay for better access to Europe’s market for beef, sugar, poultry or — in the case of Japan and Korea — cars.
And third, the CCFN scored its own goal suggesting that certain GI names were global generics.
It argued for example that parmesan was a generic term worldwide (like Hoover, or Eau de Cologne), and so could not be protected. Or that because Porto was generic in the US it should be denied protection in Vietnam or China.
This concept of global genericness contradicts IP law, which is based on territoriality. When China decides whether let’s say Pecorino Romano is a GI or generic, it looks at how that name is perceived by its own consumers. The fact it may be generic in the US is irrelevant.
CCFN also scored its own goal in claiming that the EU was trying to protect terms which *are* generic in Europe, like cheddar, brie or camembert (spoiler alert: none are GI names). So not intellectually impressive.
We also saw in the various FTA negotiations, when the partner countries were deciding — on evidence — whether or not EU names should be protected as GIs, or be declared generic, that the CCFN, its members, or in other cases third country wines or cheese producers, simple copy-pasted earlier claims.
It casts you in a bad light: if you do not make up a submission angled to the country in question. If you just copy-paste to China what you, for example, sent to Vietnam three years ago, you are not going to impress the Chinese ministry by judging the case that you have looked at local consumer perceptions. CCFN was its own worst enemy, doing a disservice to the US’s talented food and drink producers.
What will the Trump 2.0 administration do on GIs? The sector is convenient for retaliatory trade measures given its high political visibility, the fact that GIs tend to be price-premium products and not needed commodities, and are not normally part of complex international supply chains - given that their production has to be carried out in the local terroir.
And there is at least a perception that European GIs are consumed mostly by US east or west coast Democrats who shop at delicatessen. So punishing a country via GI-targeting is fairly cost-free — albeit of limited economic impact.
It may be short-term and cheap, but targeting food products for trade sanctions is a foolish and dangerous game in a world in which food security, along with climate change, is our biggest existential threat.
John Clarke was till recently a director for international relations in the European Commission and an EU trade negotiator. He was also head of the EU Delegation to the WTO and UN in Geneva. He is now a journalist, a fellow of Maastricht University and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
John Clarke was till recently a director for international relations in the European Commission and an EU trade negotiator. He was also head of the EU Delegation to the WTO and UN in Geneva. He is now a journalist, a fellow of Maastricht University and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.