The Consortium for Common Food Names, U.S. Dairy Export Council, National Milk Producers Federation and a coalition of other dairy stakeholders are celebrating a legal victory in the effort to thwart the European Union’s attempts to monopolize common food names.
The groups contend the EU is aggressively pursuing geographic indication — referred to as GI — for common food names such as parmesan and bologna within its borders and abroad.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Feb. 3 upheld a federal judge in Virginia and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Trial and Appeals Board in finding “gruyere” to be a generic term for a type of cheese.
A Swiss consortium and a French consortium had filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register the word “gruyere” as a certification mark in which the term could only be used to label cheese produced in the Gruyere region of Switzerland and France.
The U.S. dairy groups consider the court’s ruling a huge victory but say there is much more work to be done. The EU continues to attempt to restrict common food names to products made only in the EU and pressure other countries to accept those terms in trade deals — which imposes market access barriers on U.S. products.
The EU’s GI system started in the mid-1990s and has protections in place for more than 1,000 food-related GIs, and most current EU GIs haven’t been a problem, said Shawna Morris, senior director of the consortium.
“However, there are numerous GIs in the food and the wine space that have posed problems for U.S. exporters — and those are just the ones we know of to date,” she said.
“The EU has been negotiating with several markets over the past few years and has additional trade agreements in the works. All seek to mandate various restrictions on the use of common food and wine terms in order to hamper competition from other non-EU suppliers,” she said.
The EU has pursued the tactic in well over a dozen trade agreements, she said.
The proliferation of EU trade agreements and the inclusion of common name restrictions are making it clear the U.S. needs to step up its game to more directly combat the EU’s efforts to impede trade and fair competition, she said.
“We’ve seen too many cases now where countries are quite simply disregarding their own (intellectual property) rules and imposing restrictions on terms even when they were widely used in those markets before the EU deal,” she said.
The U.S needs “a committed policy of pursuing clear and specific safeguards for common food and wine terms to make it explicit the types of products our trading partners are obligated to continue to let us export to their markets,” she said.
Last week the Consortium for Common Food Names organized a meeting on Capital Hill with U.S. lawmakers and food industry representatives to underscore the need to establish strong protections for common food names with U.S. trade partners.
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