Shaping Sustainable Markets is the flagship research initiative of the Sustainable Markets Group at IIED. It explores the design, use and impact of market governance mechanisms in relation to sustainable development, aiming to improve their future design and implementation and ultimately their contribution to sustainable development. It also proposes the use of new ‘innovative’ mechanisms that have yet to be implemented but could be beneficial for sustainable development.

This paper reviews the potential of geographical indications and trademarks to protect and promote biocultural products of small producers in developing countries, and thereby contribute to sustainable development. It examines relevant international...

Products developed by indigenous peoples and traditional societies, such as traditional food crops and medicines, can protect biodiversity and provide an important source of income. This review explores the intellectual property tools of geographical indications, trademarks and rules of unfair competition for promoting these products, and protecting them from misappropriation, misuse and imitation. Limited market access is an important driver of loss of traditional crop varieties and contributes to the loss of biodiversity and traditional knowledge. This paper explores whether intellectual property rights could improve incomes, market access and livelihoods, while conserving biodiversity, and thus contribute to sustainable development. The...

The term intellectual property (IP) refers to a set of legal regimes that define rights in relation to inventions, literary and artistic works, distinctive signs and other marketable productions of the creative mind. These rights enable owners to control the use of these productions in certain ways and for certain periods. Patents, copyright and trademarks are the longest-established tools of intellectual property. Other rights include industrial designs, trade secrets, plant-variety protection, layout designs of integrated circuits, and geographical indications. IP rights confer certain privileges on owners, who are normally individuals, joint owners or entities having legal personality.² The latter are...

Geographical indications (GIs) are a unique form of intellectual property. Unlike patents, copyright or trademarks, they are not themselves a discrete and universally accepted category of IP rights. Different countries may well protect them under original and specific (sui generis) geographical indications laws, as in the European Union and India. But they may alternatively — or additionally — be protected largely or completely under the following:

an appellation (or designation) of origin regime;

trademark law, or in some countries influenced by English law under the common law tort of passing off⁵ as with unregistered trademarks; or

indirectly through unfair

They...

In countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, geographical indications tend to be protected under trademark law. In the United States, Idaho potatoes and Florida oranges, for example, are protected as certification marks. Two well-known British certification trademarks are Stilton Cheese and Harris Tweed, as discussed below. Trademarks are similar in function to geographical indications, the difference being that a GI necessarily identifies a product with a particular territory, whereas a trademark identifies a product with a trade origin, which may be a place but is likely to be a company (Moran, 1993).

Trademarks are distinctive signs, which...

Unfair competition is covered in the TRIPS Agreement and in the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Laws on unfair competition, to prevent misappropriation, misuse and imitation, can help to protect biocultural heritage-based products. As with geographical indications, and unlike trademark law in which standards tend to be broadly similar across jurisdictions, unfair competition can be regulated in various ways. All WTO members must comply with TRIPS by adopting compatible national legislation, whether in the form of new laws or revised existing ones.

Indigenous groups may want legal protection of...

About 90 per cent of existing geographical indications are from the OECD countries, and so experience of GIs in developing countries is limited (Giovannucci et al., 2009: xvii). There are some well-known GIs in developing countries that have been quite successful, such as Darjeeling tea, Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, tequila, and coffees from Colombia and Guatemala.

Darjeeling tea, for example, is grown across 87 plantations and 17,500 hectares in India. Ten million kilograms are produced each year, 70-80 per cent of which is exported — earning approximately US$30 million a year (ibid). Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is estimated to be...

This study finds that geographical indications, trademarks and law on unfair competition, if designed appropriately, may serve to promote products based on biocultural heritage. These tools of intellectual property can help to generate income that enhances the economic viability of traditional lifestyles without compromising deeply-rooted cultural and legal norms concerning access, use and exchange, which sustain subsistence economies and biodiversity.

However, evidence suggests that achieving ‘appropriate design’ is not straightforward — as outlined below. The legal, institutional and economic contexts in which GIs or trademarks are applied will determine their efficacy as a mechanism to promote sustainable development and biocultural...