Graph 1 shows the density of Georgian farmers’ revenues received from selling their produce, generated from the sample of 3,000 Georgian rural households. (For the motivation and methodology of our study, please refer to the article that was published here last week. It is also available online on the ISET Economist Blog: “Dumb Farmers Do Not Grow Big Potatoes”, by Florian Biermann and Ruediger Heining).

Retail food prices show a 2.5% decrease y-o-y and a 2.3% decrease from the previous month. Compared to February, onions, coffee, and potatoes experienced the biggest drops showing 8.3%, 7.1%, and 7.0% decreases in prices, respectively.

We first met Gogi Elanidze in winter 2015, when interviewing farmers in Rati’s village, Kvemo Alvani. Located in Akhmeta municipality, Kvemo Alvani and its twin, Zemo Alvani, are not your usual Kakhetian villages. The two serve as the winter base for the people of Tusheti, an isolated valley separated from Kakheti by the 3000m high Abano mountain pass.

This week, the Georgian public was shocked when a gross lack of competence and aptitude among the country’s teachers was unveiled. As DFWatch.net reports on March 10th (quoting a Georgian source), of the 10,552 teachers registered for a competence check that took place in January, only 6,477 showed up in the first place, and of these, only 1,101 passed the test.

On March 1-2 APRC’s Senior Researcher Salome Gelashvili attended a regional learning workshop on Food Security and Nutrition organized by OXFAM in Dilijan, Armenia. The overall objective of the workshop was to improve the food security and nutrition policies in the South Caucasus region.