Name: Natural Produktsia Ltd
Place: Dioknisi Village, Khulo Municipality
Type of business: Cheese Factory
Product: Imeruli Cheese
Suppliers: about 450 women from 13 villages of Khulo
Current production per day: 5 tons of milk (700 kg of cheese)
The Problem
The 450 women now selling milk directly to the milk collectors of the Natural Produktsia Ltd Factory in Dioknisi, Khulo used to make cheese from their milk. Women are responsible for milking the household cattle and making the cheese, butter, sour cream and cottage cheese which is then sold as an important part of the family’s livelihood.
Selling these products however is hard and uncertain. The journey by marshutka to Batumi Agrarian Market can take up to 4 hours on bad roads. It is taken to the market by husbands or other male family members or sent with the driver and met by a relative who then tries to sell it. There is no guarantee of a sale and often the family is forced to accept a low price from the market vendors rather than take it home again.
The Idea
The idea for the factory came from a member of an old Khulo farming family, Arcadi. His brother, Tsezari was already in the dairy business in Tsalka with his mother, where, hoping to escape the lack of opportunity in Khulo they moved to Kvemo Kartli and started a small cheese factory in a cowshed. This cowshed is now a purpose built factory with its Sulguni cheese supplying Carrefour and the 5 star hotels of Batumi. Alliances KK had helped them do it. Arcadi was already selling his brother’s Sulguni cheese from the familiy’s distribution outlet in Batumi Market, but Sulguni only makes up 20% of the market the other 80% is for Imeruli. When Alliances opened in Ajara in 2014, Arcadi saw his chance. He proposed a small factory collecting milk from the upper mountain villages making Imeruli cheese. The gamble was that Imeruli sells for 2 lari less per kilo than Sulguni and you have to make and sell a lot more of it to make a profit.
The Solution
450 women are now selling milk directly to the milk collectors of the Natural Produktsia Ltd Factory in Dioknisi, Khulo. The building which opened in September 2015 is compliant with the new food safety and hygiene requirements and equipped with, with new modern dairy equipment.
Milk collectors from the factory collect the milk daily from the women in their houses. The women were specially trained by a food safety consultant in producing clean milk. The women save two hours a day from not having to make cheese, they save the costs of wood or gas for heating the milk to make it and other materials such as pepsin. The family is saved the costs and time and worry of having to get to Batumi and sell the cheese.
The End and the Beginning
The programme and Arcadi were unsure of how much milk there would be. People had said how poor the little red Ajaran cow was, how despairing the rural population. Ajara however has a magic, special even to Georgia, when the news went out that the factory was open the villagers decided en masse to sell. Overnight more milk than anyone imagined was available. The factory is processing 5 tonnes of milk about 700kg of cheese a day at a time of year when many dairy factories are thinking of shutting down for the winter as milk supply dwindles until the following spring. They have turned milk away as they have yet the capacity to process more. Expansion is already on the cards. Of the cheese itself the fat content is high and the milk itself from the high mountain pastures of pristine Ajara. The cheese moreover is delicious. The queues out the door of Aracadi’s distribution outlet in Batumi Market and the fact it’s sold out by midday testify to that.
For scaling up DRR facilitation of Local Self Governments by the programme the meeting was held with the Governor of Kvemo Kartli - Ramin Ismailov.
From the ISET Economist news (http://www.iset.ge/news/?p=3871)
By Eric Livny
Democracy and Freedom Watch reported October 9, that “Georgia’s controversial new immigration law may be changed”. The law, writes DFW, “has caused a wave of confusion and irritation in the country’s expat community. Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili … told journalists that if any defects become apparent after the enactment of the new law, ‘we’ll surely correct it.''
By Helen Bradbury: Team Leader, Alliances Lesser Caucasus Programme
Information matters, it is our currency, the substance, the commodity which keeps our programmes running. We live in an age of information, are afloat on and sometimes drowning in a sea of it. We may check the oracle of google in answer to any question, live feeds, notifications and a torrent of minutiae in a mélange of events of great importance, continually assail us. Once there were spin doctors, now most of us spin daily be it personally or professionally. We are aware of the need to manage information, to have enough of it and of the right kind and most of us are aware too of the need to understand its quality and to know when and what we have is enough or too little.
The villagers of Tsintskaro village have suffered for years from the twice yearly flow of more than 100,000 sheep, cattle, goats, donkeys, horses and shepherd dogs straight past their gates. The problem has been in impasse for years with no real ownership of the issue by the myriad actors involved. Now, the local government has spearheaded the movement to solve the problem calling together support from a group including the MOA, MOE, the Regional Government and Shepherds Association which has been working for three years to improve coordination and bring the matter of the Animal Movement Route to public attention.
Drought is one of the critical disaster issues being typical for Kvemo Kartli and significantly harming agricultural sector in the region. Severe drought that occurred in this area in July-August, 2014 has negatively affected livestock husbandry which resulted with the reduced milk yield, hay production and deteriorated pastures in Kvemo Kartli.
From the ISET Economist news (http://www.iset.ge/news/?s=survival&lang=en)
By Nino Mosiashvili
The conclusion of the Association Agreement (AA) with the European Union was euphorically acclaimed by Georgian media as well as political and economic decision makers. Part of the AA is the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The DCFTA is intended to liberalize trade between Georgia and the EU by lowering tariffs and reducing non-tariff barriers. For agriculture, the most relevant changes relate to food safety (bacterial contaminants, pesticides, inspection, and labeling) as well as animal and plant health (phytosanitation). For the manufacturing sector, the removal of so-called “technical barriers to trade” is similarly important, with the goal being to prevent the usage of technical standards as a means to protect domestic markets from foreign competition. “If regulations are set arbitrarily, they could be used as an excuse for protectionism”, states the World Trade Organization on its homepage.
