Crowding out local initiative in the protection of heritage agri-food specialties: The growing hegemony of sui generis Geographical Indication in East Asia

Abstract

The comprehensive uptake of geographical indication (GI) worldwide suggests that global trade is at the threshold of mainstreaming protections for heritage agri-food specialties. The European GI model is in ascendance thanks to a campaign of institutional entrepreneurship that engendered a powerful macro-organization leading the rapid diffusion of sui generis GI. Through its success in recruiting the intellectual property regimes of most East Asian countries into the European orbit of trade and cultural production, it has become hegemonic, with the potential for ‘crowding out’ useful pre-existing mechanisms of heritage food protection or displacing exchange in agri-food specialties still embedded in the moral economy. Although this new global standard is shaped by the process of integration into new milieux, this paper finds that latent post-colonial tendencies in the European GI model and its poor capacity at self-reflection in the face of inefficiency compromises its potentially unifying role in the heritage food world order.