The patrimony blind spot of Geographical Indication in state-centred governance: Mikawa region agri-food products in Japan
Résumé
The global spread of Geographical Indications (GI) policies has provided heritage agri-food producers an opportunity to promote and safeguard the link between their products and a geographically-specified reputation. As GI has been effectively employed in Europe to foster historically established products, often with reputations going back hundreds of years, there has been an assumption that the protection of such patrimony would likely materialize in newly adopted GI countries. However, from a public policy view in many new countries, GI is not chiefly recognized as a tool to protect illustrious agri-food products from fraud and deteriorating trade conditions, but rather to expand economic opportunities and exports. The emphasis on the latter objective can compromise the capacity for a policy to achieve the former objectives. The question we raise in this paper concerns the extent to which the prioritization of economic growth encourages the adjudicators of GI (often ministries of agriculture or intellectual property offices) to accept and even encourage ahistorical territorial and production specifications that disadvantage or discourage the oldest and most traditional producers.
To this end, our argument centers around two cases of renowned traditional agri-food products in the historical Mikawa region of Japan, which have fared poorly in the new GI systems introduced since 2006. Our analysis shows that the historically legitimate regional delimitations and constellations of traditional practices that have defined very old products are sometimes marginalized or undervalued. In the case of Hatcho Miso, a red soybean miso produced since at least 1337 in a district called Hatcho, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) accepted a competing GI application that widely expanded the GI area and loosened product specifications. In the case of Kokonoe, one of the oldest breweries of mirin (a mild sweet rice wine often used in cooking), and whose product line already includes an entirely regionally sourced Mikawa mirin, they were discouraged from applying for the GI in its current implementation. One clear source of interference in securing such patrimony concerns how, in Japan and often more widely in Asia, GI is a political project with a top-down approach. Merit-based or democratic mechanism for inscribing GIs based on internal motivations, such as pride, fraud-prevention, and global recognition are replaced by strategic concerns reflecting political goals, such as inclusivity, efficiency, upscaling, and export. For Hatcho Miso, bubbling rivalries concerning authenticity and exclusivity led to dueling GI applications and a deterioration of cooperative behavior, culminating in an attempt by the traditional brewers to seek a legal injunction against the GI registration approved by MAFF. For Kokonoe Mirin, longstanding competition between comparable breweries in the region and the lack of differentiation offered by the GI label, undermined the communal solidarity required to establish a regional producer group demanded in the GI application (Sonnino, 2013). At the macro-level, theis might explain why Japan, despite featuring many agri-food products with hundreds of years of patrimony, has seen less interest in, and more conflict about, the registration of such products as GIs.
Domaines
Sciences de l'Homme et Société
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)