The members of the Organization for an International Geographical Indications Network (oriGIn), honored by the presence and opening speech delivered at the Bordeaux General Assembly by Mr. Stephane Le Foll – French Minister of Agriculture – agreed to adopt the following Declaration:

Whereas Geographical Indications (hereinafter GIs), play an important role in the global economy and in the sustainable development of local communities,

Whereas GIs face growing and more sophisticated phenomena of imitations and usurpations, including the ones concerning the unfair use of GIs on the Internet,

We believe that international policy-making bodies should act to adapt the multilateral legal framework to the new challenges of the XXI century. In particular,

- we encourage the Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to make clear and significant progress toward the effective multilateral protection of GIs at next Ministerial Conference to be held in Bali in December 2013;

- Meanwhile, we ask the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to conform its regulations on generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to the internationally accepted rules on Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and, therefore, fully consider GIs as prior rights deserving protection in case of irregular use in gTLDs;

- We would like to congratulate the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Working Group on the reform of the Lisbon Agreement on the Protection of Appellations of Origin and Their International Registration, for its proposal to amend the Agreement, extending its scope of application to GIs and providing for a single and ambitious level of protection for both Appellations of Origin and GIs. In this respect, we welcome the Working Group recommendation that the Lisbon Union Assembly approve at its 2013 session the convening of a diplomatic conference in 2015 for the adoption of a Revised Lisbon Agreement, .and we encourage the WIPO Member States to work along the lines proposed by the Working Group.

Finally, we recognize that in 2012 and early 2013, important results have been achieved on GIs in the European Union (EU). Both the recently adopted “Milk Package” and “Quality Package” contain modern and effective rules for the sector. We would like to congratulate the European institutions for these crucial results. In view of the critical issues to be discussed in the second part of 2013, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the single CMO negotiations, the reform of the Community trade mark, the customs enforcement of intellectual property rights and the new of agricultural products promotion policy, we encourage the European institutions to continue the excellent work done so far, in particular with respect to the option of managing production volumes for all GIs, the effective application of the rules concerning GIs as absolute grounds for refusing trade mark applications and the possibility to seize counterfeited GIs in transit in the EU. 

Moreover, we welcome the recent publication by the European Commission of a Study on GIs for non-agricultural products in the EU, which oriGIn contributed to finalize. Such study clearly highlights the huge potential of non-agricultural GIs in Europe. As a result, we encourage the European institutions to work in the following years on the establishment of a sound community legal framework providing non agriculture GIs with an effective protection against misappropriations and counterfeiting.