Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas is a member of the Senate Finance Committee and the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. That makes him, among other things, the first person to have chaired both the House (1995-97) and Senate Agriculture Committees. He was not the first person to raise the issue of geographical indications - the EUs controversial system for granting exclusive rights to the names of certain foods to producers in specified locations - at the trade hearing on January 27. Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) did that in his opening statement. In discussing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Senator Hatch said that the T-TIP agreement "must effectively address the systematic misuse of geographical indications to create market barriers."
Senator Roberts was, however, the committee member who most effectively raised the issue with Ambassador Froman. There was more to his question than the telling offhand remark that is today's featured quote, but not much. There didn't need to be. The issue was familiar ground to all concerned.
Last April, for example, 45 senators sent a letter to Ambassador Froman and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, setting out a series of concerns about GIs. "In country after country," they wrote, "the EU has been using its FTAs to persuade trading partners to impose barriers to U.S. exports under the guise of protecting GIs." The senators went on to cite the example of a recent EU agreement with Central America, which includes new restrictions on the use of the term "bologna" for exports of that meat from the United States.
The issue is not restricted to Central America. It is global. Another place where the EU made significant progress in its worldwide campaign for recognition of its system of GIs was in its partnership agreement with the South African Development Community. In a letter last August to South Africa's ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, the Executive Director of the Consortium for Common Food names, Jaime Castaneda, wrote:
"As a result of [the new partnership agreement], many cheeses sold in the South African market may now only originate in the EU. We recognize that some of these products legitimately warrant GI protection, but many others do not. These are products, such as feta, asiago, fontina, gorgonzola and others - that have been produced in the United States and globally for many decades and are widely accepted as generic."
A Bicameral Issue. We should point out that concern about GIs - and the EU's success in that area - is not exclusively a Senate concern. When Ambassador Froman got to the House side for his January 27 testimony before Ways and Means, Chairman Ryan (R-WI) showed him some Wisconsin Gouda to help underscore Wisconsin's ire over GIs. With the cheese in his hand, Chairman Ryan said:
"This is my favorite cheese [holding it up.] It's Wisconsin Gouda, smoked Gouda made in Monroe, Wisconsin, and smoked at Swiss Family Smokehouse in Evansville, Wisconsin. For generations, we've been making Gouda in Wisconsin. And for generations to come, we're going to keep making Gouda in Wisconsin. And feta, and cheddar, and everything else. So, it is extremely important that we do not allow these countries we're entering into trade agreements [with] to use these kinds of improper barriers to block U.S. dairy exports."
Ambassador Froman's responses to the questions he got in the House and Senate on GIs were essentially the same. We found his response to Senator Roberts, however, especially cogent. Here is some of that:
"This is one of the toughest outstanding issues still in TPP, because we and the EU have diametrically opposed positions. Our view is that our system works well for Europe. There are 18 trademarks for Parmesan Reggiano in the U.S. And Europe sells hundreds of millions of dollars of cheese in the United States, and we don't sell any in Europe. And so we have been out there fighting hard to make clear that we can have a system where countries can take into account common names and trademarks before they grant any geographical indications. And that's the only way to balance perspectives of the United States and the European Union.
"Our challenge is our trading partners are negotiating with us, but they also want to negotiate and want to have good relations with the European Union. And so they're stuck in the middle, and we're trying to find a middle path that will protect our trademarks and those common names."
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