Few products carry as much identity in a single word as Basmati. The long-grain, aromatic rice has been cultivated in the foothills of the Himalayas for centuries, prized for its fragrance, its elongation when cooked, and its place at the center of tables around the world. It is also serious business: Basmati can sell for roughly twice the price of ordinary long-grain rice, and India alone accounts for around 65% of global Basmati trade, with Pakistan supplying most of the remainder.

That combination — deep cultural heritage and real commercial value — is exactly what geographical indications (GIs) were designed to protect. The challenge in the Basmati case is that the rice is genuinely rooted in two countries, India and Pakistan, with Nepal entering the competition in recent years.

First: what exactly is a geographical indication?

A geographical indication is a form of intellectual property that protects the name of a product whose qualities, reputation, or characteristics are essentially attributable to its place of origin. Parmigiano Reggiano can only come from a defined zone in northern Italy. Darjeeling tea can only come from Darjeeling.

GIs sit within the global IP framework through the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement (Articles 22–24), and most major jurisdictions operate their own registries. Unlike a trademark, a GI does not belong to a single company. It belongs, in effect, to a place, and to every producer within it who meets the specification.

Which raises the question at the heart of this story: what happens when the "place" straddles a contested border?

Act I: the Texas patent that started it all

The modern Basmati saga begins not in Delhi or Islamabad, but in Texas. In 1997, the US company RiceTec was granted a patent covering "Basmati rice lines and grains" — hybrid varieties bred in the Americas, marketed under names like Texmati. To many in South Asia, this looked like the appropriation of a centuries-old heritage by a firm thousands of kilometers from the Himalayas.

India challenged the patent, armed with scientific evidence and prior art documentation. By 2001–2002, RiceTec had withdrawn or lost the broadest claims, and the patent's sweeping title was narrowed to specific rice lines. The episode became a global reference point in the debate over biopiracy — and, notably, it was a moment of rare alignment between India and Pakistan, who shared an interest in defending the name.

It was also a wake-up call. Heritage alone protects nothing. If you do not formally register, document, and defend your claim, someone else may define it for you.

Act II: bringing Basmati home

India moved first on the legal infrastructure, passing its Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act in 1999. In 2016, after years of evidence-gathering led by the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), Basmati was registered as a GI in India, tied to the Indo-Gangetic plains across seven northern states. Even that domestic registration was contested: the state of Madhya Pradesh fought for years to be included in the defined zone and lost — a reminder that drawing a GI boundary is as political as it is scientific.

Pakistan's legislative response came later. Its Geographical Indications (Registration and Protection) Act was enacted in 2020, and in January 2021 Pakistan registered Basmati as a domestic GI, anchoring the claim in the Punjab region on its side of the border. Both countries could now say, with full backing of their own law: Basmati is ours.

Act III: the showdown in Brussels

The real prize, however, is recognition in export markets — and none matters more than the European Union, which, according to estimates from around 2020, imports on the order of 900,000 tons of Basmati a year, roughly two-thirds of it from India.

In July 2018, India filed an application with the European Commission for exclusive PGI status for "Basmati". When the application was published in 2020, Pakistan formally opposed it, arguing that Basmati is the shared heritage of both countries and that exclusivity for India would devastate Pakistani exports. Then, in August 2023, Pakistan escalated: it filed its own rival PGI application for the very same name, which the Commission examined and published for opposition in 2024.

The two applications now sit in parallel before the Commission, and the dispute has grown teeth. India has objected that Pakistan's application covers territory India considers its own, making any joint application politically impossible from New Delhi's perspective — even though the EU has reportedly encouraged exactly that kind of shared solution. India's APEDA has gone as far as the European Court of Justice after the Commission declined to release the annexures to Pakistan's application, citing international relations. And the whole question has become entangled with the India–EU free trade agreement negotiations, where GI recognition for Basmati is one of India's most sensitive asks. A quarrel over rice is now shaping one of the largest trade negotiations in the world.

Why the world is watching

The EU has faced shared-heritage names before. Feta was contested across the Balkans before being locked to Greece. "Gruyère" is protected for regions spanning the Franco-Swiss border in Europe, yet US courts ruled the word generic in America — and New Zealand's IP office rejected India's Basmati certification mark on similar distinctiveness grounds. The same name can be sacred in one jurisdiction and ordinary in another.

Basmati raises the stakes further because the geography is contested at the level of sovereignty itself, and because so much money rides on the answer. Europe's Basmati market was estimated at roughly USD 667 million in 2025, and analysts have suggested that exclusive recognition could shift hundreds of thousands of tons of trade between the two exporters. Whatever the Commission decides — Indian exclusivity, a transnational GI shared across the border, or continued limbo — it will set a precedent for every heritage product whose homeland does not fit neatly inside one flag.

The view from the Gulf

For readers in the GCC, this is not a distant curiosity. The Gulf is one of the world's largest Basmati-consuming regions — Saudi Arabia is consistently among the top importers of Indian Basmati — so the outcome in Brussels will ripple through pricing, branding, and labelling in markets much closer to home.

More importantly, the region has its own heritage assets asking the same questions. Khawlani coffee from Jazan, Al-Ahsa dates, Omani frankincense, Levantine olive oil traditions: each carries qualities inseparable from its place of origin, and each is a candidate for the kind of formal protection Basmati's custodians spent decades assembling. As Saudi Arabia builds out its intellectual property (IP) ecosystem under Vision 2030, the Basmati story is a masterclass in what that work demands — and what it costs to leave it too late.

Five lessons for anyone managing IP

1. Register before you need to. India and Pakistan spent years reacting — to RiceTec, to each other, to the EU's procedures. Formal protection secured early is always cheaper than litigation later.

2. Evidence is the asset. Every stage of this dispute — the patent challenge, the domestic registrations, the EU applications — was won or stalled on documentation: cultivation records, scientific characterization, defined boundaries, proof of reputation. A claim without a paper trail is an opinion.

3. Boundaries are strategy. The Madhya Pradesh exclusion and the Kashmir problem show that defining "where" a product comes from is a strategic decision with winners and losers, not a formality.

4. Protection is jurisdiction by jurisdiction. A name protected in Delhi or Islamabad means nothing in Brussels, Auckland, or Washington until it is registered and defended there. Global portfolios need global thinking.

5. Shared heritage needs shared strategy — or a very long fight. The one moment India and Pakistan cooperated, against RiceTec, they won decisively. The moment they turned on each other, both entered a limbo now approaching its eighth year.

These are, at their core, lessons about lifecycle discipline: capturing evidence as it is created, governing assets before disputes arise, and treating protection as a continuous process rather than a one-time filing.

Ready to protect what makes your assets yours? Contact us to see how NovaLexi can help you document, register, and defend your intellectual property — before someone else defines it for you.