On May 19, 2017, at the Radisson Blu Iveria hotel, the Agriculture Policy Research Center (APRC) of the ISET Policy Institute (ISET-PI) presented two reports regarding “The Georgian Tea Value Chain Study” and “The Georgian Trout Value Chain Study” value chain analyses.

The ISET team conducted an online survey that began with the following question: if you could choose where to be born, what country would you pick? We intentionally formulated the question in this way, which is very different from asking “where would you like to travel or to migrate?” This formulation was meant to allow us to look into characteristics of countries to determine which ones individuals find interesting and appealing if a veil of ignorance is added about their initial standing in the society (e.g. in family and/or social class status at birth).

On March 7-8, ISET’s ENPARD team with an M&E coordinator from CARE, took a field trip to Adjara, hosted by UNDP Adjara, which is one of the implementer of the ENPARD project (agricultural cooperative development across Georgia). UNDP Adjara recently became involved in the Annual Cooperative Survey, which has been carried out from the beginning of the implementation of the ENPARD project by other ENPARD implementer consortia (Care, Oxfam, Mercy Corps and PIN).

On February 20, ISET students delivered yet another policy seminar. The seminar was opened by Eric Livny, the president of ISET, who delivered an inspirational speech regarding the jobs of the future. He posed the question, “In this rapidly changing world, what do we need to teach schoolchildren today so that their skills and knowledge are still relevant ten or twenty years from now?”.

Food prices continue to follow the latest trends. Retail FPI shows a 2.6% increase m/m (that is, compared to January 2017) and a 4.9% decline y/y (that is, compared to February 2016). During the last two weeks, matsoni, tea, and carrots lost value (by 10.4%, 6.2%, and 6.2% respectively), whereas the prices of cabbage, greens, and eggplant increased (by 25.0%, 16.1%, and 14.9% respectively).