Agriculture Minister sums up 2020, notes there was no interruption in food supply

Food supplies have become a challenge for many countries amid the pandemic, said Agriculture Minister Levan Davitashvili earlier today when presenting the annual report, but noted that Georgia overcame these difficulties very well.

We created a special system to monitor food supplies and ensure that the population of the country was provided with food, had stable stocks and no interruptions in supply...We had a continuous supply of all products. We always monitored the wheat stocks and that was the task of our ministry, but in addition to wheat we started monitoring all the primary products," said Davitashvili.

He noted that in parallel with the fight against the pandemic and its negative effects, the ministry continued to implement all the projects developed by the state to promote development of the agricultural sector.

The development of a business-oriented agrarian sector remains the main goal,” said Davitashvili.

We are strengthening all the links of the value chain in agriculture, we work to promote the production and sale of high-quality Georgian products,” he noted.

In 2020, despite the crisis situation created by the pandemic, the export rates of Georgian products are growing at a record high,“ he said, pointing to increased exports of peaches, apples, hazelnuts, persimmons, tangerines and blueberries.

He said that as of December 13, Georgia exported over 25,000 tonnes of peaches, 16,000 tonnes of tangerines, 12,000 tonnes of hazelnuts, 10,000 tonnes of persimmons, 6,000 tonnes of apples and 600 tonnes of blueberries.

The minister said that 280,000 tonnes of grapes were harvested this year which was a record number in the past 30 years.

Davitashvili noted that about 25,000 grape growers handed over the grapes to the wineries. They received up to 310 million GEL in revenue.

The grape harvest 2020 was subsidised.

Thousands of wine growers were given the opportunity to sell 1 kg of Rkatsiteli for 80 tetri. If not for the state subsidy, due to the market demand, farmers would have had to sell 1 kg of Rkatsiteli for 50 tetri, which could not cover the costs. The sum of grape subsidies reached 51 million GEL,” said Davitashvili.

Davitashvili spoke about increased access to financial resources for farmers and business owners.

State participation in liabilities with financial institutions is much higher, I mean the interest rates on loans to farmers and business owners covered by the state,” said Davitashvili.

The minister spoke about the agricultural anti-crisis plan which was developed to support farmers and said that 300 million GEL was allocated to neutralise the impact of the pandemic.

Several assistance packages have been developed under the anti-crisis plan which are:

• Subsidising the cost of agricultural goods and plowing services, from which more than 172,000 farmers have already benefited from the programme. The amount of the accrued subsidy exceeds 30 million GEL
• Agro Diesel Support Programme: more than 123,700 beneficiaries received agro-diesel discount cards up to 32,000 tonnes under the programme and saved more than 5.2 million GEL in total
• Irrigation costs were fully written off, with 34,600 farmers benefited the programme which amounted to total savings of over 3.8 million GEL