Abstract*A range of social movements mobilise around and seek to valorise 'place-based' imageries. There is, these movements argue, vitality in place. As anthropologists remind us, people continue to construct some form of boundaries around place, however permeable and transient those boundaries might be. In the context of global agrifood, a diversity of socially generated marks indicating conditions of origin have emerged that seek to speak to a range of moral economies. Within this constellation, Geographical Indications (GIs) appears as a remarkable place-based intellectual property which the article appreciates as the juridical reification of a placed-based stabilisation of cultural norms. However, rather than idealise GIs, the paper also probes a 'politics in place' through a fieldwork-based study of a recently acquired GI for Feni, a liquor distilled from either coconut of cashew apples. Juxtaposing observations of Feni distilling with the specifications that constitute the GI, the paper explains these differences in terms of the local social relations of power. The Goa government aligned itself with the recently established Feni Association, mainly composed of large distillers with bottling operations, to acquire the GI and was successful because of the complicity of the GI Registry office.
The article uses the case of Basmati to identify a number of problems concerning geographical indications, including the interface with trademarks and the issue of genericity. Attempts to enter and free‐ride on Basmati's premium rice market include the use of trademarks and (RiceTec's US) patent. Reviewing these, the article notes the subject matter of geographical indications can be implicated by other forms of intellectual property, such as patents. The case of Basmati is all the more problematic because of its transborder reality for which no provisions exist in the Agreement on the Trade‐Related Aspect of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The article outlines and discusses various institutional models for a joint registration of Basmati between India and Pakistan as a possible solution for the TRIPS requirement of “home protection” (compare article 24.9).
The article is about implementing obligations under Article 27.3(b) of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). However, concerned with the fragmentation of international law in a globalised world, the article uses Kenya as a case study to interrogate the apparent choice and latitude in Article 27.3(b). At the TRIPS Council, Kenya has sought to locate Article 27.3(b) within a wider frame by adroitly norm-borrowing, and it canvassed for integrating norms and principles from other multilateral agreements into TRIPS. Yet, when introducing plant breeders' rights into domestic law, Kenya fails to either explore the apparent latitude or deliver on its rhetoric in Geneva. I explain this decoupling between Geneva rhetoric (ritual) and domestic law (behaviour) as another symptom of what Steinberg [(2002), 'In the Shadow of Law or Power? Consensus-Based Bargaining and Outcomes in the GATT/WTO', International Organization, 56 (2), pp. 339-74)] characterises as 'organised hypocrisy' of the World Trade Organisation. In demonstrating that fragmentation in global legal architecture may not automatically emerge in domestic law, the article draws out the significance of attending to a domestic political economy of law-making.
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