On 31 March 2022, the European Commission has proposed a draft regulation on European Union geographical indications for wine, spirit drinks and agricultural products, and quality schemes for agricultural products, that is open for your feedback until 8 June. This is the last step of a consultation process that started in October 2020. The main controversy concerns the externalization of some tasks to the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office).
There are 3.207 geographical indication protected products across the EU, representing a sales value of €74,76 billion and 15,5% of the total EU agri-food exports. The sales value of a product with a protected name is on average double that for similar products without a certification. Consumers are willing to pay a higher price for authentic products.
The EU Commission aims at achieving the following objectives:
- increased protection for geographical indications on the internet, specifically with regard to sales via online platforms, protection against bad faith registrations and use of geographical indications in the domain name system;
- more sustainability by allowing producers to valorise their actions relating to social, environmental and economic sustainability in their product specifications;
- empowering producers' groups to manage, enforce and develop their geographical indication by having access to anti-counterfeiting authorities and customs in all EU countries;
- a shortened and simplified registration procedure will merge the different technical and procedural rules, resulting in a single geographical indication registration procedure for EU and non-EU applicants.
Some stakeholders are preoccupied by the EU Commission’s plan to externalize some responsibilities to EUIPO, they would rather that the Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI) remain exclusively competent. In their opinion, also producers’ groups need to be strengthened. In addition, the sustainability requirements should be voluntary, according to some Member States’ representatives. The new framework should also include an update of the existing rules for official controls, in order to take the specificities into account.
The draft regulation indeed proposes not to make the green criteria mandatory, and the EUIPO will only provide ‘technical assistance’ to the Commission.
