Respecting the ham in free trade
Before Christmas a few of us were discussing a photo of a British grocery on Twitter when my colleague Chris Selley chucklingly pointed out a packet of “Greek Style Salad Cheese” on the shelf. This is obviously an awkward name for what, in any Canadian grocery, would just be referred to as feta — no matter where it came from. But the world of food in the European Union, to which Britain still belongs for the moment, is different. With, in cases like this, slightly amusing results.
Over there, the continentspanning trademark l aw protects an array of geographic designations for particular regional specialty foods, and “feta” is one of them. If your feta isn’t authentic Greek phéta, you have to find a clumsy alternative way of telling shoppers what they are buying.
The r el at i ve absence of protected “geographic indications” ( GIs) in North American law might seem like the more freewheeling libertarian approach, and when the Americans are involved in a trade negotiation, they tend to fight against accepting other countries’ GIs.
But there is a flip side to this, as one of the classic Canadian trademark cases reveals. For decades — as the Globe and Mail’s Ann Hui discussed in a Dec. 25 report — Maple Leaf Foods was able to keep prosciutto from Parma entirely out of Canada because it held an established ordinary trademark on a “Parma” brand of ham. The prosciutto makers of Emilia- Romagna enforce their European “Parma” GI co- operatively, and spent vast sums trying to sue their way into Canada with their brand intact — to no avail.
You have to admit that this doesn’t look much like a laissez- faire outcome — keeping the world’s best prosciutto out of Canadian consumers’ hands because the pig farmers from Parma were too slow to make use of the word “Parma” in the Canadian market. ( The name of the city of Parma is so ancient, it’s not even Latin, but Etruscan.) Assuming you’re going to have laws about commercial trademarks or truthful product descript i ons at all, it probably makes a lot of sense to make sensible provisions for GIs. This might involve, as European law does, recognizing that certain food traditions are appropriately treated as having cultural property rights attached.
This is not, mind you, a travel column. CETA, the Canada- Europe free trade deal awaiting evaluation by the European Court of Justice, will extend a select list of food- related European GIs to Canada for the first time. Canada already honours wine and liquor GIs, but Annex 20-A of the agreement adds several dozen meats, fruits, cheeses and other products to the list of names protected here. The schedule is already being provisionally applied, and, as one consequence, prosciutto di Parma will be able to compete here with Maple Leaf ’s “Parma,” which has been grandfathered in as a permitted trademark. (By a similar token, Canadian “feta” will still be allowed to exist.)
Annex 20- A makes for a comical little culinary tour of Europe in itself, even if, like me, you haven’t wandered all over Europe sampling local food specialties of varying obscurity. You can see why the co- operatives that hold GIs value them so highly, and as hard financial assets. I don’t have any earthly idea what is special about the particular Lebkuchen of Nuremberg, and I question whether the various sausages of Portugal are truly more exquisite than those of east- central Alberta, but I kind of want to eat everything on this list in alphabetical order.
Annex 20- A is also a little embarrassing, if you’re a Canadian studying it, because in principle CETA runs both ways. There is atable, Part B, for Canadian geographical indications we might wish to have protected in Europe. But Table B is empty. It is a hypothetical legal object, awaiting the day in the distant future when our country, almost the exact physical size of Europe, develops regional food cultures that are one per cent of one per cent as sophisticated as those of Europe.
Of course, it would be unfair to hold Canadian food producers to the standard of Europe in this regard. ( And Mundare sausage really is nice.) Canada, considered as a historical enterprise, has been a vast machine for extirpating pre- existing cultures in order to make room for mass commodity agriculture. Much of what you read about in the Canadian papers — in the business section, politics, what have you — concerns our continuing emergence from that phase.
That includes silly lifestyle stories about bespoke farmers’ markets, bison ranchers, and chefs preoccupied with “local sourcing”: there is something very much unsilly about these trivialities, something that hints at the grander scale of history lying before us. It’s a scale with which the folks in Parma are born familiar.