A few months ago, the People’s Republic of China and the European Union signed the bilateral agreement “EU-CN GI Agreement” (hereinafter Agreement), which represents the first trade deal regarding the protection of the European geographical indications (hereinafter GIs) in China and, vice versa, the Chinese GIs in Europe.
It should be noted that the Agreement has come a long way: after eight years of negotiations, completed on 6 November 2019, the signing of the Agreement officially formalized the commitment of both parties on 14 September 2020. The Agreement subsequently came into force starting from 1 March 2021, marking the beginning of a path in the name of mutual and deep protection of 96 European GIs in China and 100 Chinese GIs in Europe.
On the European side, the majority of GIs are represented by the category of wines, followed by spirits and cheese. With regard to China, instead, fruit and vegetables constitute the largest portion of GIs covered in Europe by the Agreement.
The Agreement, which currently covers a total of 196 GIs, aims at broadening its scope, providing for adding further 350 (175 for each party) by 1 March 2025.
Starting from the premise, the official text of the Agreement focuses on the importance of an “harmonious cooperation” and “protection”. With regard to the protection, the Article 4 clearly promotes this commitment, calling each party to protect GIs against:
any use of a geographical indication identifying an identical or similar product not originating in the place indicated by the geographical indication in question, even where the true origin of the goods is indicated or the geographical indication is used in translation, transcription or transliteration, or accompanied by expressions such as “kind”, “type”, “style”, “imitation” or the like”.
With regard to the cooperation, the Agreement calls for a stable and common activity of promotion and implementation of GIs, to be pursued through the dissemination of information and awareness-raising campaigns among commercial operators and consumers. In relation to the implementation, the Article 10 of the Agreement defines the presence of a Joint Committee with the main objective of monitoring the implementation of the Agreement and following its intensification.
In this regard, last January 19, the first Joint Committee was convened, which confirmed the position of both parties on what is contained within the Agreement.
The importance of GIs reflects a number of benefits for both consumers and producers. In the first case, the GIs guarantee the consumer a three-fold guarantee, namely the certified origin of the product, the quality in line with the relevant specifications and the authenticity against any possible imitation.
Regarding the producer, the GIs allows the sale at a premium price, the conservation of the traditional local production, as well as the possibility of developing related economic activities as the agritourism.
From an economic point of view, the importance of both market and commercial exchanges between China and the European Union cannot be underestimated. In fact, China is the third-largest destination of the EU food products and the second destination of products covered by GIs. In 2020, these latter reached a value of exportation equal to € 17 billion.
It is clear that the promotion and the protection of GIs represent a field of great relevance in the framework of China-EU commercial exchanges. For this reason, the Agreement aims to be a vehicle of new interesting opportunities for both parties in order to enhance the quality of exchanges and, at the same time, strengthen the mutual trust.
On a practical level, it is worth recalling that the inclusion of a product within the Agreement does not replace the trademark registration by the titled subject (in the forms provided for by the Chinese law), which remains necessary in order to successfully continue the initiatives for the GIs protection in legal terms.
It will therefore be responsibility of the commercial operators to urge the organization to register the GI as certification or collective mark, in order to have the proper rights granted against any possible attempt of violation.
China Desk – Zunarelli Law Firm
