On November 21, Prof. Dr. Stephan von Cramon-Taubadel gave a presentation of a working paper entitled “Trade Costs for Heterogeneous Agricultural Products” at ISET. The professor himself and Mr. Yi Qu are the co-others of the paper, which aims to evaluate trade costs for 125 different agricultural products based on 1992-2011 data from 156 different countries.

After a couple of declines, food prices in the largest supermarkets in Georgia have increased. In the first two weeks of November, an upward trend was maintained: Retail FPI was 2% higher compared to the same period of October. An increase in FPI was driven by an increase in the price of fruits and vegetables. On an annual basis, we still record a significant overall 9.5% decline (November 2016 VS November 2015).

On November 14, Dr. Nadja El Benni, employed at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) until October 2016 and starting at Agroscope (Swiss Confederation’s center of excellence for agricultural research) in January 2017 as head of the Strategic Research Division “Competitiveness and System Evaluation”, visited ISET.

Under the Soviet system, farmers worked under strong central control; everyone knew what to do. Important economic decisions were not left to the market or decided by self-interested individuals. Instead, the government, which owned or controlled much of the economy’s resources, decided what, when, and how to produce. Along with providing necessary inputs, the state ensured that farmers had access to markets for their goods.

On November 8-9, the ENPARD team at ISET-PI participated in the 'Interagency Conference about Three Years of Implementation of ENPARD – Cooperative Development Component'. The conference was organized by one of the ENPARD implementer consortiums led by People in Need, a non-governmental organization, at Akaki Tsereteli State University in Kutaisi.