Thailand, Indonesia, and India are

Thailand, Indonesia, and India are pioneers in developing and utilizing GI and AO for their agricultural products and food. Vietnam can draw out precious lessons from these countries, from strategy building for agriculture and rural development to detailed solutions to protect agricultural products under GI and AO.
Thailand and its process of applying regulations on GI
The utilization of geographical indication to protect agricultural products and food in Thailand derives from the fact that Thailand runs the risk of loosing their traditional product market, particularly Jasmine rice.
Jasmine rice from Thailand (later called Hom Mali) is a product well known in the national and international market in terms of label, form, and special taste . Every year, this product makes up a great proportion of exporting agricultural products in Thailand. Only in 2003,
Thailand export more than 2.2 millions ton of Jasmine rice, which brings Thailand about 31,282 billions Baht. However, in September 1997, an American Company called RiceTec registered to protect the label of their product named “Jasmati” . They advertised their product as a copy of Thai Jasmine rice. As a result, the Thai began to be afraid that the consumers would get confused and believe that both the two prod ucts (their Jasmine rice and Jasmati rice) were of the same quality and that this company would threaten their exporting rice market.
At that time, Thai government found a solution, that i.e. applying regulation of Trips decree into Thai situation. Nevertheless, difficulties rose because of two main reasons:
• The first one is that Jasmine was not a geographical name. Hence, it was necessary to make the consumer aware of the link between Jasmine rice and it geographical location - Hom Mali.
• Thai law did not indicate regulations concerning geographical indication . Accordingly, the geographical indication of this country cannot be protected abroad.
Therefore, a temporary solution was chosen, that i.e. the Thai government issued a standard for Jasmine rice, which allowed using the trademark of Hom Mali. This became a signal certifying the origin of Jasmine rice. Any one wanting to use Hom Mali trademark had to meet with the requirements of production and processing . This standard played the role as an important premise for the application of geographical and appellation of origin in Thailand
later.
Parralelly, Thailand actively institutionalizes Trips regulations into their law. The parliament drafted a bill on geographical indication while the government created a program to apply these regulations.
• Thai government in 2002 discussed the bill on geographical indication but it was rejected 5 times. Furthermore, in March 2003, the bill was criticized sharply by the parliament because they stated that it was wrong to protect only local plant and breeder. Until March 2004 can this bill be approved. However, all the products of natural origin, agricultural, industrial and crafting products can be protected according to this law.
• Together with the effort of the parliament, Thai government conducted a program supporting local people to develop and commercialize those products basing on traditional skill and local knowledge. The government would give support in terms of technology and management techniques to help local people to commercialize their products by national and international consuming channels or by Internet. Apart from that, the government also assisted in training with new production technology, advertisement techniques as well as design of label and package. Thanks to this, the products satisfy all the requirements of global quality standard.
Within this program, there were more than 1000 products from 75 provinces t hat are produced and consumed through supporting channels of the government. Nevertheless, when the law in geographical indication was not approved by the parliament, there was already an abuse of trade name in the market, so more than 1000 products were at the risk of loosing their advantages.
Another challenge was that since the validity of the law on geographical indication in April 2004, Thailand should find the way to make their products different in terms of quality as well as spread this law so that it was widely known and any violation would be supervised and solved. The best choice was using a taking note system, each locality and commercial company played the role as the supervisor of production process as well as of the quality stability. These stakeholders also supervised all violation in the market.
The law on geographical indication was then applied in reality and solved many difficulties concerning Thai specialities. This can be shown that since February 2004, there has not been any case that needs to be interfered by the court of law.