Publications
- International Republican Institute - IRI
- Macroeconomic policy
- Media & democracy
The agricultural cooperative movement started a few years ago in Georgia and the registered farmer groups are currently still at the embryonic stage of development. The Soviet legacy and rather negative attitude towards earlier forms of cooperation (Kolkoz and Sovkhoz) has gradually faded among farmers, and today more than 1,400 cooperatives are registered with the Agricultural Cooperative Development Agency under the Ministry of Agriculture of Georgia.
With EU financial and technical assistance, as well as training and education on cooperation and agribusiness, small farmers in Georgia are benefitting from economies of scale, cutting their production costs and increasing efficiency.
Unless its glorious past during the Soviet Union, the Georgian tea sector rebounded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet only partially as the economic and political stability of the post-independence period left a mark on the overall productivity of the sector.
As a freshwater resource-rich Caucasian country, Georgia is well-positioned to produce high quality trout in its mountains. However, the Georgian trout sector is struggling and faces a number of constraints to further development.
Georgia is one of the northernmost tea producing countries in the world. The humid and subtropical Black Sea climate creates ideal conditions for growing tea in five regions of Western Georgia: Adjara, Guria, Samegrelo, Imereti and Abkhazia.
The concept of food security (FS) is holistic and brings together the notions of the availability of sufficient amounts of food, access to food, food utilization (including nutrition aspects) and stability in the food supply.