On December 16, in cooperation with MOLI, ISET organized a dialogue on “The Role of Leaders in Modernizing Georgian Agriculture”. The MOLI (Market Opportunities for Livelihood Improvement) project is implemented by the HEKS/EPER office in South Caucasus with the support of the Swiss Government.

The main purpose of the dialogue was to share lessons learned from a review of existing supply chain relationships in Georgian agriculture with a focus on those replicable, scalable, and sustainable models that lead to gains in productivity and income for all value chain actors.

The expert panel included the Minister of Agriculture of Georgia, Levan Davitashvili, CEOs of major Georgian agricultural businesses, and donor representatives. The dialogue was moderated by ISET’s president, Eric Livny.

During the dialogue, it was shown that large buyers and aggregators have the capacity to:

• Strengthen or create new value chains – e.g. beef and dairy;

• Set and enforce rigorous agricultural production standards (basic business conduct norms, such as consistency, timeliness, reliability, as well as compliance with food safety and organic production protocols, etc.) – e.g. large milk collection companies, slaughterhouses, retailers;

• Provide private extension services and financial investment in equipment, seedlings, chemicals, etc. (e.g. in nuts, grape production);

• Address logistical bottlenecks in access to domestic and export markets (e.g. citrus).

This discussion was an example of how Georgia could use Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) as policy instruments to target donor and government resources at leading companies that could be the drivers of modernization in Georgian agriculture.