On December 15, the Prime Minister of Georgia Vladimer Gurgenidze was visiting the West-Georgian regions. He was accompanied by the Minister of Agriculture Petre Tsiskarishvili.
At the start of his visit, the prime minister arrived in Batumi; at the airport, he was met by the Chairman of Ajara Autonomous Republic Levan Varshalomidze. They left for Khelvachauri village where Vladimer Gurgenidze visited the citrus plantations belonging to the local farmer Aleksandre Churkveidze. He took part in picking tangerines.
He also dropped at the citrus recycling plant the Narinji Fruit Company. To his assessment, this is a newly found, modern type, dynamic, export orientated enterprise with large-scale plans and interesting business concepts. This year, the company exported 700 tons of tangerines to Ukraine, Moldova and Byelorussia and the rest of two thousand tons are in the process of recycling. According to the words of the minister of agriculture, export is undertaken mostly to Ukraine and Kazakhstan as well as to other countries of Middle Asia. This year, the export area is considerably larger than in the previous year and twice more amount of citruses have already been exported compared to the entire harvest of the last year, yet the present harvest is thrice more than the last year one. The prime minister viewed one more modern processing line belonging to the Georgian Product LTD.
Vladimer Gurgenidze attended the presentation of Poti port and made a motorboat trip along the Poti coastline. He emphasized particular importance of the free economic zone in Poti and on this he commented the following: "Georgia has a clear cut transit function; the Poti port, which counts 148 years of its existence, was initially designed for absolutely different cargo and freight turnover in an entirely different situation. Today, in order to maintain the transit function of the country our main task is to increase its passage capacity. This is the aim that can be fulfilled (at least partially) by way of creating a free economic zone here. Apart from the transit function, this project will be of paramount importance for increasing the Georgian exports, because many new enterprises as well as a number of new logistic centers will be naturally linked with this project; all this, eventually will bring about more jobs. I don't exclude that in a few years after implementation of this project, we will even face deficit of the labor force in this region. The future 10 years are very promising in terms of a lot of novelties to be introduced, which will enable Poti port to become compatible throughout the Black Sea basin as well as in the Mediterranean. Besides, the country will maintain and even reinforce its transit functions (we mean in this the cargo turnover from the middle Asia countries to the countries of the European Union and there is a potential of involving China too). The plans and enthusiasm is too elevated, but whatever we need now is hard work and completion of the above mentioned plans. Right investors will have to be selected and after this only technical issues will be left to be resolved", - asserted the prime minister.
At closing of the visit Vladimer Gurgenidze went to the Khibli LTD, a joint Georgian-German enterprise producing gypsum and cardboard and showed keen interest in its production activities.
The press center of the Chancellery of the Government of Georgia