July 01, 2006	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Sani 4, 1427

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LAHORE, June 30: Farmers’ bodies want the government to `show some urgency’ in deciding the case of geographical indication for basmati rice which has been pending with it for the last few months.

They say the new crop will be in the market by late October or early November, and the case, which is an export requirement under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime and the European Union, must be decided at the earliest for the benefit of growers.

If it is delayed, the potential beneficiary could be middleman, traders and sheller operators. All stakeholders of the rice, except for growers, have withholding capacity and could wait for the decision.

Explaining the nature of their demand, Mr Hamid Malhi of the Basmati Growers Association says under the WTO and EU rules, every exportable commodity has to be registered under the local law before taking it to the importing country.

The registration process represents registering qualities of a crop that a particular area can produce. It is basically registering soil qualities, which reflect in a crop. “That is why it is known as geographical indication.” The association, he says, has applied for the registration of super basmati variety in December 2005 with the Trade Mark Registration Authority. It called for objections, if any, from other stakeholders as per legal requirement.

Interestingly, the Indians have also filed their objection because they have got the same variety registered in India in sheer violation of the spirit of the intellectual property rights. The deadline for filing objections expired on April 28. Now the authority has asked for the filing of detailed objection from all other parties. The process is being delayed because the country does not have expertise for the finalisation of legal requirements, he says.

“Some urgency in the matter has been injected by the fact that the Indians have got super basmati registered as their own variety,” says rice exporter Muhammad Ashraf. The Indians have been importing Pakistani rice in third country like the UAE and been repacking it as their own variety. They sow some stolen rice in the Indian Punjab and now want to claim intellectual rights on the variety. The Pakistani side has to fight it out in India as well because they have to legally prove that no other area in the world could produce rice with same aroma, texture and other qualities. It is the soil that lends certain peculiar properties to its crop and the farmers owning the fields are entitled to benefit from it, he says.

The Pakistanis, says rice grower Hamid Khawaja, should have got the variety registered long ago. But they did not, giving the Indians a chance to take advantage of our ignorance and lethargy. Though Pakistan could still win a case, the process would be more lengthy and cumbersome. It should be taken as a wakeup call for other crops that Pakistan should get registered.

The Pakistani side, according to him, is also divided against itself, as one objection against the registration has come from none else but the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan (REAP) and other farmers from Sindh. This will weaken the case of rice growers from the central Punjab. Growers from Sindh say that they should also be entitled to registering the same variety. If that argument is accepted, subsequently the Indians can claim that if such a variety can be sown and reaped in Sindh, why it can’t be sown in India. All these conflicts first have to be resolved internally and then taken to the world for registering super basmati as a variety belonging solely to the central Punjab area, he says.