Toothpaste, bouillon cubes new frontiers of piracy
31 Jan 2007 17:36:52 GMT Source: Reuters
By Laura MacInnis GENEVA, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Cheap everyday items such as pens and disposable razors are increasingly being counterfeited and many retailers unwittingly stock their shelves with fake products, companies and officials say. Once preoccupied with software, music, films and luxury goods like handbags, law enforcement and business experts meeting this week puzzled over ways to fight piracy in bottom of the market goods. Nestle <NESN.VX> chief executive Peter Brabeck told a news conference that Maggi bouillon stock cubes were the most frequently copied of all the company's 8,500 products, which include KitKat chocolate bars and Nescafe coffee. "Everything you can imagine is being counterfeited," Peter Avery of the OECD's directorate of science, technology and industry told Reuters. "New products are being discovered all the time. The range of products is expanding, and the magnitude," he said during a conference organised by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a U.N. agency. Criminals are making money manufacturing fake versions of inexpensive items, which are then slipped into normal supply chains for retail distribution, even in developed countries. "Tonnes and tonnes" of fake toothpaste have been uncovered in Senegal, to quote just one example, said World Customs Organisation chief Michel Danet, who described counterfeiting of cheap items as a form of money-laundering. Research by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has yet to be released, will estimate that up to 2 percent of all goods crossing international borders might be counterfeited or pirated, Avery said. "A lot of retailers may be unwittingly stocking these products," he said. The pharmaceutical sector has had particular trouble with faked drugs mixed in with genuine ones and counterfeited items can be very hard to detect, he added. His OECD colleague Wolfgang Huebner said retailers ought to be aware of the average cost of the products they buy and report cut-rate deals. These often signal piracy that in consumer goods can cause injury, illness or death. "If they see cheap branded products they should be very suspicious," Huebner said. Even kiwi fruit and bananas have suffered copyright piracy, with black-market sellers using falsified brand stickers of the U.S. fruit giant Chiquita <CQB.N> and others to get more money for their goods, Avery said.
