The European Union protects over 1,000 Geographical Indications for distinctive regional foods such as Parma ham and Feta cheese. This paper tests whether external protection of Geographical Indications through trade agreements has increased exports of European Union Geographical Indications. The answer matters for trade policy, because the protection of at least some Geographical Indications has been a red line in recent trade negotiations. We use detailed export data for cheeses, covering the 2004–2019 period. The analysis uses the latest trade models that take into account the possibility of zero-trade flows for certain goods. We find that legal protection of Geographical Indications in trade agreements does not generally lead to significant additional exports above and beyond the general export-promoting effects of trade agreements. This finding should limit international fears of protected Geographical Indications widely displacing comparable products made outside of the European Union.
One of the main objectives of EU trade policy is to establish wider protection for its regional specialty foods, known as Geographical Indications (GIs). In spite of US opposition, the EU has successfully considered additional protection for its GIs a red line in recent trade agreements. A key piece to the puzzle of this success is that whereas the literature has typically treated trade and non-trade issues as a dichotomy, GI protection encompasses both trade and non-trade aspects. In the EU, trade agreements are negotiated by the Commission but require member state approval. Both Greece and Italy have threatened not to ratify CETA over insufficient GI protection, so GIs clearly matter. This article develops and tests a theory of GI protection using new data on GIs listed for protection in 11 recent EU trade agreements.
The idea of origin in terms of space and culture as a special indicator of quality is one of the most influential strands in contemporary food. It impacts on politics, economics and everyday life – and it connects these fields with complex relations of power and culture. With geographical indications, the EU offers an instrument which allows for the declaration of specialties, qualified by their tradition, as typical for a defined area. The declaration serves to protect these products as intellectual and collective property and presents them as culinary heritage, thereby enabling sale at an added value. Accordingly, the EU instrument of geographical indications evokes the interests of a variety of disciplines, such as (agricultural) economics, (social) geography, sociology, anthropology and law. Nonetheless, dialogue and cooperation among the disciplines are quite rare. “Taste | Power | Tradition” gives an insight into this multidisciplinary debate and brings together empirical data and theoretical reflections from different perspectives.
This Cost of Non-Europe report seeks to quantify the costs arising from the lack of European Union (EU) legislation protecting Geographical Indications (GIs) for non-agricultural products and to analyse the benefits foregone for citizens, businesses and Member States. The report estimates that introducing EU-wide GI protection for non-agricultural products would have an overall positive effect on trade, employment and rural development. More precisely, after approximately 20 years of implementation, such a protection scheme would yield an overall expected increase in intra-EU trade of about 4.9-6.6 % of current exports (€37.6-50 billion) in the more relevant sectors. Expectations are that regional-level employment would rise by 0.12-0.14 % and that 284 000-338 000 new jobs would be created in the EU as a whole. The expected positive impact on rural development would materialise, among other things, through direct support for locally based high-quality producers, rural economic diversification and local producers' capacity to organise collectively.