e 1998 Georgian nuts have become one of the country's major export products.
One of the advantages of Georgia's agricultural sector is the high percentage of produce that is organic in nature. The country has not been using fertilizers and pesticides for some 10 years. Now the country is preparing a certification process whereby all farmers producing organic food will have their farms approved and certified as organic. This is expected to generate new interest in Georgia's agricultural sector, particularly from markets in the West where demand for organic food is increasing far beyond supply.
Georgian Tea . Georgia is a northerly tea growing country with a relatively shorter growing season than other tea producing nations. Tea is grown in West Georgia in Guria, Samegrelo, Ajara, and Imereti Regions. According to official statistics for 2001 [20] [2], these regions possess slightly more than one-quarter of the country's total 564,518 hectares of agricultural land.
At independence in 1991, the country had 64,500 hectares of state-owned tea plantations. Civil war, decline in demand from former markets in the FSU and the loss of state financing have caused much of the area formerly planted to tea to be abandoned. As of January 2002, 37,296 hectares of agriculture land were planted to tea. Tea plantations now occupy 65 percent of Guria's total agricultural land, 27 percent of Samegrelo's total agricultural land, 58 percent of Ajara's total agricultural land and 6 percent of Imereti's total agricultural land (Table 1). Following the abolition of collective agriculture, land under tea plantations has mostly been privatized in Guria, while in Samegrelo, Ajara, and Imereti most of the tea plantations have been leased out.
Tea leaf production data in the early 1990s is extremely unreliable and so not reported here. It is clear that production levels have fallen greatly from those of the late 1980s. Production has generally continued to drift downward since the mid-1990s (Tables 2-3, Figures 1-2).
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, as of January 1, 2001 there were 146 tea processing enterprises in Georgia (including Abkhazeti) with a total annual capacity of 722,800 tons. There were 50 tea factories in Samegrelo, 30 in Guria, 16 in Imereti, and 18 in Ajara. Forty-six of the 50 enterprises in Samegrelo had been privatized, while 30, 11 and 1 enterprises had been privatized in Guria, Imereti, and Ajara, respectively. These enterprises mostly use worn-out, obsolete equipment and are in poor financial condition. Some of these enterprises are reported to have vertically integrated operations, while others operate on a contractual basis with tea growers. As might be expected, almost all tea grown appears to be sold to the factories so that the processing trends follow those...
