Geographical Indications in Tea

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. Tea carries more of these rights than most agricultural goods. India holds at least four, 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. This page documents the mechanism itself: what the right is, how it differs from the two instruments it is most often confused with, what the WTO treaty behind it does and does not require, which tea names are registered, how the protection behaves in an export market, and what the economic literature finds the premium to be worth. The individual country fights are documented in their own references on this site and linked from here rather than retold.

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, 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, which makes it the clearest working illustration in the trade: the Lion Logo is a certification mark the Sri Lanka Tea Board owns, first registered as a trademark in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and since registered across Europe, the Middle East and several other markets, while "Ceylon tea" and seven regional district names carry a separate GI registration. Both are set out in Sri Lanka's Tea Economy. The practical difference is the power to withhold. 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.

None of the three should be confused with the voluntary sustainability schemes covered in Tea Certification, which verify how tea is grown and traded rather than where it comes from.

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, and its most consequential feature for tea is a tier that tea does not sit in.

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, a distinction the trade press rarely spells out. Producers of an origin tea are therefore fighting a harder evidential case abroad than producers of an origin wine, for reasons of drafting history rather than of any difference in how the two crops are grown.

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. Both exceptions are live in tea. The first is why an origin name that has drifted into common use as a product description cannot be pulled back, and the second is why enforcement abroad so often turns on who filed at a trademark office first rather than on who grows the crop.

The registered tea names

Tea's protected names are concentrated in three countries, and the three arrived at them by different routes: India product by product through its own registry, Sri Lanka by registering a national name and its districts together, and China as a bloc, through a bilateral agreement with the European Union.

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. That is the reverse of the Indian model: rather than contesting misuse office by office in each export market, 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. This is the single most misunderstood property of the instrument, and it is why a small growing district can end up funding litigation on several continents at once.

Darjeeling's record is the fullest documented case in tea, and the WTO's own case study on it², written from the Tea Board of India's files, shows how differently the same name fares in two jurisdictions. In Japan the Tea Board pursued three separate Japanese registrants: 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. In France the terrain ran the other way. The 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, and 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.

Two working conclusions follow for any producing country weighing the same effort. First, the cost of a geographical indication is not the registration, it is the permanent enforcement budget behind it, spent in currencies and legal systems the origin country does not control. Second, the outcome in a given market is decided less by the merits of the origin claim than by whether that market's law lets an origin name block a trademark application for different goods, which is exactly the point on which Japan and France diverged.

What the name is worth

The case for the whole apparatus rests on a premium, and the best available measurement of that premium is a European one. 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, foodstuffs, wines and 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.

Read that figure with the caution its own authors attach to it. It is an average across four regimes, two of which are wine and spirits, the categories that also hold the stronger legal protection. 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, with performance varying substantially between product categories and regions. A doubled price is what the best-placed names achieve after years; it is not what registration delivers on the day the certificate is issued.

The corrective case is a tea one. Darjeeling has held Indian protection since 2004 and European protection since 2011, it is defended in courts and trademark registries on three continents, and 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. Over the same period 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.

A geographical indication settles who may print a name, and it does so imperfectly, at a cost the origin country carries indefinitely. It does not settle how much tea there is to sell under that name, what the market will pay for it, or whether the gardens behind it can stay open. Those are decided at auction, and a registry cannot reach them.