Geneva, June 12: Italian ham-makers, Guatemalan coffee farmers and Indian rice growers linked up on Wednesday to push for a global trade pact protecting their products from imitation or piracy. Other producers of goods bearing well-known place-names who joined a new pressure group -- OriGIn -- included German knife-makers and mango and tea growers from Guinea and Sri Lanka, all backed by the European Union and India.
"This is a cause shared by many developed and developing countries, and it unites tens of millions of consumers as well as producers whose livelihoods are threatened," group president Pedro Echeverria of Guatemala told a news conference.
"But it is especially vital for poor countries."

OriGIn, or Organisation for an International Geographical Indications Network, wants current World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules protecting location names of wines and spirits, such as Cognac or Hungary's Tokaj, extended to all other products.
Geographical indications, or GIs, are emerging as a key issue in WTO Doha Round negotiations for a new global free trade pact and have set the EU and many poorer nations against the United States, Canada and Australia.
The clash has at its root efforts by immigrants -- mainly but not only from Europe -- into the three countries and some others to reproduce and market products such as Parmesan cheese or Czech Budweiser beer made by their forefathers at home.
Home country producers say such products are at best poor copies and at worst low-quality counterfeits "stealing" a name to mislead consumers and snatch markets from the genuine item.
Ham-makers from Italy's Parma region say abuse has reached a point where they cannot sell the product in Canada or Mexico as Parma ham because firms in both make their own version.
"They are in effect stealing the name, because in international law at present there is no protection," said Leo Bartozzi of the Parma region Parmesan cheese producers.
But US, Canadian and Australian officials at the WTO argue that the EU -- whose trade commissioner Pascal Lamy voiced strong backing for the OriGIn launch by video-link from Brussels -- is pushing the issue as a form of protectionism.
"They just want to protect their goods from cheaper products, and divert attention from their vast agricultural subsidies," said one Australian envoy.
Guinean fruit farmer Maurice Karamo and Indian basmati rice producers' leader Anil Adlakha rejected that argument. "It is not about protection, but of trading fairly," said Karamo.
"A product grown the other side of the world, even with the same methods, cannot be the same as the original one. The ecology is always different, so the product is as well." Bureau Report