YEREVAN-BORN AZERBAIJANI MINISTER ATTENDS FAO CONFERENCE IN ARMENIA
Nelly Danielyan
"Radiolur"
13.05.2010 17:45
The 27th regional conference of the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization is under way in Yerevan. The conference aims to discuss
the ways of fighting against starvation through development of
agriculture. The next such meeting will take place in Azerbaijan in
2010. The Azerbaijani delegation has also accepted an invitation to
participate in the conference.
"I was born in Yerevan on May 25, 1954. I attended school in Armenia
and then entered a university in Baku," head of the Azerbaijani
delegation, Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Agriculture Ismat Abasov told
reporters today.
Ismat Abasov is the first Yerevan-born Azerbaijani to visit Armenia
after the start of the Karabakh conflict. He said to have visited his
house at Alaverdyan Street in Yerevan, which he left in 1971. The
Minister also visited the village of Shshkaya (now Geghamasar)
in Vardenis region, where he spent his summer holidays when he was
a child. Today the village is home to Armenian refugees displaced
from Azerbaijan.
Touching upon the Karabakh issue, Ismat Abasov said: "The authorities
in both Armenia and Azerbaijan want the conflict to be solved in a
peaceful way. Otherwise, Azerbaijan will be looking for alternative
solutions," the Minister said, not ruling out the possibility of a
military solution.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
has provided Armenia with total of $1.8 million in 2008-2009, said
organization’s Director-General Jacques Diouf at the 27th FAO regional
conference. He said that the FAO is ready to keep on assisting and
supporting Armenia.
Armenia’s Minister of Agriculture Gerasim Alaverdian, in his part,
emphasyzeed the importance of the two-day regional conference in the
context of the approval of the FAO two-year program. Gerasim Alaverdian
said that the FAO had directed $40,000 to Armenia for a burial ground
of pesticides, and is developing a program of establishing of special
laboratories, estimated to cost $2 million.