BURIED TREASURE: GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS IN THE ARABIAN GULF REGION

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is home to more than forty-two types of dates, generating around 2 billion dollars. These small fruits are an important part of the daily nutrition of GCC nationals, their culture and history, and economic activity. Geographical indications (GIs) are valuable legal tools that simulate economic development while protecting cultural assets. GIs function as an indicator of origin linking goods of reputation, quality, or other characteristics to a geographical region. Employing GIs in the GCC Member States — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — is a worthwhile complement of a larger intellectual property strategy to diversify revenue beyond oil and gas. However, implementation of this legal tool in the GCC requires overcoming obstacles not addressed in the legal literature: challenges from certain religious interpretations; international obligations; and domestic experiences. Once these analyses are tackled, an opportunity to expand the applicability of GIs to live animals or religious products could increase the ways in which GIs are utilized in the region. This research introduces a unified GCC GIs framework factoring in religious, cultural, and regional aspects. Finally, the method and result of this work could be beneficial for not only GCC government officials, but also other Middle Eastern, North African, and Islamic countries desiring to develop a GIs framework.