BY CAT WIENER
The European Union is calling for a World Trade Organisation (WTO) disputes panel to rule on a challenge to United States trademark law by French spirits distributors Pernod Ricard, which is involved in a joint venture with Cuba's Havana Club rum producers.
Section 211 of the 1988 US Omnibus Appropriations Act (part of US budget legislation) was included at the behest of the piratical Bacardi rum company to allow it to illegally market its own "Havana Club" rum in the US, where the authentic Cuban rum is banned under the blockade. Section 211 ensures that trademarks connected to assets confiscated by the Cuban revolutionary government cannot be registered without permission from the original owner.
Bacardi argues that it recently bought the trademark from the original holders, the Arechabala family, who had held it in Cuba prior to the 1959 revolution. But the Arechabalas had allowed the trademark to lapse in the 1970s when it was registered instead by Cuba's Havana Club Holdings in 70 countries, including the US.
Bacardi, the world's biggest "family owned" spirits maker, with sales of some 20 million cases of rum a year, clearly feels threatened by Havana Club, which today is the fastest growing spirit brand in the world. The joint venture with Pernod Ricard has been expanding at 25% a year since it started in 1994.
The European Union says the US section 211 legislation is discriminatory and violates several US obligations under the WTO agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPs). It says that registration of a trademark "cannot be made conditional on the consent of a trademark owner who has abandoned his rights".
The European Union's concern is, obviously, fuelled not so much by concern for Cuba as alarm at the increasing hegemony of the US over world trade. It is likely this dispute will join the issue of banana import quotas and the ban on hormone-treated beef as something of a test case for the European Union's determination to prevent US-based multinationals from riding roughshod over European business interests.
For those involved in the campaign against Bacardi and its anti-Cuba stance, the dispute, which is unlikely to be ruled on for at least six months, is of no less importance.
[From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! at <http://www.rcgfrfi.easynet.co.uk>.]