Europe’s Food Regions Fight to Keep Their Good Names

For Andrea Bonati, producing Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese is more than a profession.

“When I was a kid, I used to steal it from where my mother kept it,” he says of the cheese better known around the world as Parmesan. “It’s an addiction. It starts running in your blood. It’s something that deeply affects the feelings of the people who make it. Once you start, you can’t stop.”

But there are two kinds of “Parmesan” in this world.

One is Bonati’s beloved Parmigiano-Reggiano, a hard, dry, fragrant cheese made to exacting specifications by a consortium of Parma-area producers that he heads. To the makers and most Italians, this is the only real Parmesan, served grated or in elegant slivers.

Then, in their disparaging view, there’s that cheap generic stuff made from other cheeses that comes in cardboard containers and is sprinkled like so much salt on spaghetti.

Now Bonati, his consortium and European officials have placed the word “Parmesan” squarely at the center of an escalating slugfest between European and U.S. manufacturers over the traditional names of specialty foods.

The European position is that the right to make a product called “Parmesan” should belong exclusively to the Parma consortium and that producers of other local foods should have similar rights.

Paolo Galloni makes Parma ham, a dry-cured raw ham, less salty than most prosciutto, that is famed for its delicate flavor.

Like many producers of regional specialties, Galloni argues that specific natural conditions at the food’s place of origin are an essential ingredient to its quality. “The speed of the breeze flowing from the hill is perfect for slow and sweet curing of the ham,” he said, pointing to the open windows of the curing room.

The food fight is both cultural and economic.

For the Europeans, this is a battle to defend traditional culture against an onslaught of soulless industrialization and globalization.

Without the economic advantage that comes from exclusive rights to the regional food’s name, advocates of these protections argue, small local producers lose their ability to compete, and as they disappear they carry old traditions with them into oblivion.

U.S. manufacturers, however, see all this as an ill-disguised effort to overturn trademarks, wipe out rights to produce various kinds of generic foods, and boost the profits of European producers at the expense of foreign competitors.

A recent legal victory by Bonati’s group means that U.S. and other producers who don’t belong to the 650-member Parma consortium can no longer sell “Parmesan” cheese in the European Union, although they are still free to sell their shake-onto-the-pasta product under another name.

A Growing List

The European Union enforces rights to the names of about 600 regional foods, ranging from famous products such as Italy’s Parma ham and France’s Roquefort cheese to such lesser-known items as 10 distinct varieties of Greek table olives.

The list is constantly growing. This month, for example, the Roman artichoke, or “carciofi romaneschi,” was added. “Now people will be sure that when they ask for a Roman artichoke, that’s what they will get,” said a satisfied Antonio De Amicis, director of the Coldiretti Farmers’ Union.

EU negotiators are now trying to extend such protections globally through the World Trade Organization, and possibly expand them into other areas.

If they were to completely succeed, no U.S. manufacturer would be able to use the names of the 600 products, including the cheeses Parmesan, Grana Padano, Roquefort, provolone, Romano, Asiago, Gorgonzola, Fontina or dozens of lesser-known names. Nor could they call their products Parma ham or balsamic vinegar.

“If you want to know what you’re eating, you have to know the place of production. It’s part of the richness of Italian culture,” said Mirella Galloni, one of the second-generation owners of a family-run firm producing Parma ham in the hilly countryside near the city.

Her cousin Paolo said that for producers elsewhere to market “Parma ham” constitutes an attack on both the identity and the livelihood of people from the region.

“Food is part of the cultural identity of a people,” he said. “If you’re in a global world, your personal identity has to be defended.”

Galloni factory literature explains to consumers that the way to savor the ham is to “concentrate, sniff a slice ... and then allow it to melt in your mouth. Enjoy the taste achieved through artisan skills. Wait 20 seconds and discover that no aftertaste remains.”

One should also appreciate the ham’s “intense, rosy color, brilliant and fast even after slicing,” it adds. “Thus we visually recognize a gourmet masterpiece.”

Because the ham is lightly salted, the salt must be spread by hand in precisely the correct manner, Paolo Galloni said. Then the ham must be cured at exactly the right temperature. If it is too cold, it won’t absorb enough salt, while if too warm, it may spoil.

Federico Desimoni, legal advisor to the consortium of Parma ham producers, said that the reputation of regional specialties is destroyed if other products are sold under the same name.

“We won’t just lose market share,” Desimoni said. “We lose a culture, because the typical product is not just a quality product. It’s a product coming from a region, from a culture, from a human experience.”

It is the southern part of Europe that cares most about all this, Desimoni added. “For sure, if you lose this kind of product, you will lose a little part of Italian, Spanish, French, Greek culture,” he said. “If you produce the same ham, maybe not so special, but quite similar, throughout Europe, you lose. You’ve made out of a lot of cultures one multiculture.”

Antonio Posteraro, a soccer coach who lives in Rome, credits Parmigiano-Reggiano with boosting his team’s performance.

“A couple of hours before we start the game, I give a piece of Parmigiano to my players,” he said. “It’s rich in calcium and vitamins, and the taste is wonderful. We tried to substitute it with another type of cheese, but it wasn’t the same.”

Posteraro said he believes that it’s important to protect regional foods because “if we standardize everything, we will lose the flavors. Behind these flavors is our culture.”

Many Italians worried about the rights of specialty food producers were particularly pleased by the Parma cheese makers’ victory on the word “Parmesan.”

“This is an essential step which will help the EU demand quality standards to be safeguarded ... ridding the world of all the counterfeit Italian products littering the planet,” declared Italy’s farming federation, Confagricoltura.

But now that the Parma producers have the exclusive rights in Europe to the Parmesan name, they aren’t even sure they want to use it. Bonati said the consortium hasn’t decided whether its members should boost their use of the word in selling Parmigiano-Reggiano in foreign markets or instead seek to wipe it out.

Personally, he said, he thinks that it would be best to avoid using the word, because linking “Parmesan” even more closely in consumers’ minds with “Parmigiano-Reggiano” would simply lower the image of the real product.

Global Protections

On the same day in June that the court issued its Parmesan decision, EU officials and representatives of more than a dozen other countries proposed major new global protections for localities’ rights to regional food names. India, Nigeria, Thailand and Bulgaria were among the co-sponsors of the proposal at the WTO trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, or TRIPS, council in Geneva.

The TRIPS agreement already provides legal protections for certain wines and spirits, and the proposal would extend those rights to a broad range of traditional food products.

Although manufacturers anywhere would still be allowed to do their best to imitate a region’s specialty food, they generally would not be allowed to market it using the traditional name.

The proposal raises the possibility of extending such protections in the future to textiles and other products, meaning that certain types of Indian saris or Turkish carpets, for example, could eventually be listed.

A European victory at TRIPS would not by itself overturn any trademarks or rights to use names that are considered generic.

But in broader WTO negotiations on agricultural trade, the European Union is pushing for even greater global protections for the names of regional specialty foods.

In these negotiations, the EU proposal would allow localities that first created a product to recover exclusive rights to its name even if it has been registered as a trademark outside Europe or is considered generic. A company in Canada that has registered “Parma ham” as a trademark, for example, would have to give it up, or a U.S. firm making generic “Parmesan” cheese would have to call it something else.

A coalition of 15 U.S. companies and food trade associations responded to these developments by releasing a blistering letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick criticizing EU actions and urging him to fight the proposals.

EU efforts “have the potential to undermine current trademark protection as well as the marketing of food products in the EU and other countries,” the letter said. “If successful, the EU could create significant new barriers for U.S. exports, particularly for food products, and especially for meat, cheeses and beverages.... Recent EU pronouncements hint at their true agenda--to challenge existing protections for trademarks and generic products.”

The proposed new WTO rules would create a particular burden for countries such as the United States with a multicultural heritage, where immigrants brought with them traditional methods of food production that now enjoy trademark protection, the letter said.

Yet Desimoni, the Parma ham lawyer, argues that the U.S. position is little more than a defense of thievery.

“You can say, ‘But why can’t we reproduce the same product in another part of the world?’ ” he said. “First, I would feel, you are stealing the idea. It’s not your idea.”

One should also note, he added, that it is generally small, rural producers who benefit from stronger protection.

“I think the only way for these areas not to go to sure death is to have a business,” he said. “And if you lose these areas, if you lose the villages, then you also lose the culture.”

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Maria De Cristofaro of The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.