Geographical Indications in Tea
What a geographical indication legally is, how it differs from a trademark and a certification mark, what the WTO treaty behind it actually obliges, which tea names are registered where, and what the empirical literature says the premium is worth.
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A geographical indication is a legal right in a place name. It identifies a good as coming from a defined territory whose conditions give that good a particular quality or reputation, and, once registered, it reserves the name for producers inside the territory who make the product to a written specification. India holds at least four for tea, Sri Lanka has registered its national name together with seven regional ones, and China's tea names entered European protection as a bloc under a bilateral treaty rather than one case at a time.
A geographical indication, a trademark, and a certification mark
The three are distinct instruments, and the distinction decides who can be stopped from using a name.
A trademark identifies one commercial source. It belongs to a company, and the company can sell it, license it, or move production somewhere else entirely without losing it. A geographical indication cannot be owned that way. It is a collective right attached to a territory, used to identify products that come from a place and have the characteristics of that place1. It is available to any producer inside the defined region who meets the specification, and impossible to relocate, because origin is the thing being certified.
A certification mark sits between the two. It is a mark that a body owns and licenses to others, certifying that the goods meet a written standard, and that standard may include where the goods came from.
Sri Lanka runs both instruments over one crop: the Lion Logo is a certification mark the Sri Lanka Tea Board owns, while "Ceylon tea" and seven regional district names carry a separate GI registration. Both are set out in Sri Lanka's Tea Economy. A certification mark's owner licenses use and can refuse a licence; a geographical indication cannot be refused to a producer who is inside the region and meets the specification, and cannot be granted to one outside it.
The treaty floor: what TRIPS obliges, and what it does not
The international floor under every national GI system is the WTO's TRIPS Agreement.
Article 22 sets the standard level of protection and covers all products1: members must provide the legal means to stop a geographical indication being used in a way that misleads the public about origin, and to prevent unfair competition. That is the tier tea occupies, alongside most other agricultural goods. Article 23 sets a higher level, and it applies only to wines and spirits1: subject to a number of exceptions, those names must be protected even where the misuse would not cause the public to be misled at all.
Under the same treaty, a wine name is defended whether or not anyone is deceived, while a tea name is defended only where deception or unfair competition can be shown. Producers of an origin tea are therefore fighting a harder evidential case abroad than producers of an origin wine.
Article 24 then sets out the exceptions1, of which two matter most. A name that has become the common or generic term for a type of product need not be protected; the WTO's own example is cheddar, which now names a kind of cheese rather than the English village. And a term already registered as a trademark can keep its priority.
The registered tea names
| Name | Origin | Protected as | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Darjeeling | India, West Bengal | Indian GI application filed 2003, granted 2004 | The first product of any category registered under India's GI Act. Documented in India's Tea Industry and The Tea Board of India |
| Assam (Orthodox) | India, Brahmaputra valley | Indian GI since the late 2000s | Restricts the name to leaf grown and made in the valley from the Assamica variety. See Assam's Tea Economy |
| Nilgiri (Orthodox) | India, Nilgiri district, Tamil Nadu, in the southern Western Ghats | Indian GI, filed November 2007 and certified December 20083 | Held by the Tea Board. The registry lists its certificate as number 100. Only the orthodox manufacture is covered |
| Kangra | India, the Dhauladhar slopes of Himachal Pradesh, 900 to 1,400 metres4 (about 2,950 to 4,600 feet) | Indian GI in 20055; EU GI on 29 March 20234 | |
| Ceylon tea, plus seven regional names | Sri Lanka | GI, running alongside the separate Lion Logo certification mark | See Sri Lanka's Tea Economy |
| Pu'er7 | China, Yunnan | Protected in the EU under the EU-China agreement in force since 1 March 20216 | In the first batch of 100 Chinese names |
| Fuzhou Jasmine, Wuyi Rock, Lapsang Souchong, Anxi Tieguanyin, Panyong Congou, Fuding White and Songxi Green8 | China, Fujian | Same agreement | Fujian contributes more of the protected Chinese tea names than any other province |
The Chinese entries came from a single instrument. The EU-China Agreement on Geographical Indications6 entered into force on 1 March 2021, protecting 100 names from each side in its first phase, with a further 175 from each side following four years later. China obtained reciprocal recognition across the entire bloc in one negotiation, and the European Union obtained the same for its own names in China. The industry those names come out of is described in China's Tea Industry.
Enforcement runs one jurisdiction at a time
A geographical indication is territorial. Registering a name at home creates a right that stops at that country's border. In every other market the origin country must obtain protection under that market's law, and then defend it there.
The WTO's own case study on Darjeeling2 shows how differently the same name fares in two jurisdictions. In Japan the Tea Board pursued three separate Japanese registrants. It brought an invalidation action against Yutaka Sangyo Kabushiki Kaisha's "Darjeeling tea" mark carrying a map of India, an action against International Tea KK's "Darjeeling Women" device mark, which the Japan Patent Office's Board of Appeal invalidated in August 2002 as contrary to public order and morality, and an opposition to Mitsui Norin KK's "Divine Darjeeling" logo.
The French examiner rejected the Tea Board's opposition to a Dor Francois Marie filing in unrelated goods classes on the ground that the goods concerned did not share the same nature, function and intended use, or the same distribution circuits. The case study records that while the Indian system protects French geographical indications, France does not extend reciprocal protection to Indian ones. A separate French filing took the name for clothing, shoes and headgear outright. What that campaign cost, and the parallel filings contested in Russia and the United States, is set out in India's Tea Industry.
What the name is worth
A 2020 critical review of the empirical economic literature on geographical indications9 summarises two contracted AND-International studies covering EU GI products across all four of the EU's GI regimes: agricultural products and foodstuffs, wines, aromatised wines and spirits. The later study found that EU GI-protected products carried, on average, a 107 percent value premium over comparable non-GI products, slightly down from the 114 percent identified on 2010 data9.
The same review records that price premiums can only be achieved over the longer term, and that not all specialty products will be able to achieve a price premium on the strength of GI labelling9.
Darjeeling has held Indian protection since 2004 and is defended in trademark registries on three continents. The quantity of tea sold worldwide under the name has been measured at several times the district's real annual output, an arithmetic set out in Darjeeling's Priciest Tea Isn't Its Biggest Earner. The district's own production has fallen by roughly half, for reasons of aging bushes, weather and labour that are documented in India's Tea Industry and have nothing to do with the strength of the legal right.