ISET’s Irakli ‘Rati’ Kochlamazashvili, the deputy head of the Agricultural Policy Research Center, has been awarded the prestigious MASHAV Scholarship to attend the “Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics – Changes in the Era of Globalization” program conducted by the International School of Agricultural Sciences of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Robert H. Smith, Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Environment.

On June 29, at the Tbilisi office of USAID G4G, a round table discussion about Agricultural Land Registration Reform was held. The meeting was organized by the ISET Policy Institute under the “ReforMeter” project. During the meeting, the land registration process and achievements and challenges of the land market in the country were all discussed.

2017 was a challenging year for Georgian agriculture. There is a decline in the level of sown areas, which decreased by 10.5% in 2017 compared to 2016. 214.9 thousand ha in 2017 is the lowest figure for the last four years. Average yields and production decreased for most crops, as well.

ISET Policy Institute collaborated with Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) to start a training course about integrating ecosystem services into local development planning.

Back in 1991, I attended a big “Does Socialism Have a Future?” conference hosted by my alma mater, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The session I remember most vividly featured a Hungarian dissident, a poet, ridiculing ineffective communist propaganda. “Communists”, he told a sympathetic audience, “tried to convince us that jeans can cause impotence in young males and that Coca Cola is bad for people’s health”.