VITICULTURE REQUIRES SPECIAL ATTENTION
Norair Hovsepian
Azat Artsakh, Republic of Nagorno Karabakh
Oct 17 2006
Vladimir Zakiyan, the NKR minister of agriculture says restoring
viticulture in Karabakh is already a great achievement. However,
he says planting a vineyard is not the only thing to do. The problem
of problems has not been solved yet. "Wine growers cannot wait, they
have to sell their product as soon as it is ripe," says the deputy
minister. Now, with regard to planting vineyards there is progress.
For instance, in 2000 there was 960 hectares of vineyards, 1322.2
hectares in 2003, and 1546 hectares in 2005. In 2005 7409 tons
of grapes was produced. These are just figures. Let us see what is
hiding behind these figures. The government conducts a loan policy to
develop this sphere. The policy was launched in 1999, and over these
years it has been modified and made more controllable. The government
also provides long-term loans to facilitate viticulture for rural
land owners. Although the outcome of this policy will become clear
later. The approximate comparison of government loans and the cost of
planting a vineyard shows that private capital is also invested. And
this tendency remains dominant. We asked Mr. Zakiyan if there is an
overall program of development of viticulture. He said, it is not
difficult to work out such a program, and there is already one, but
the implementation requires immense costs. There are a great number of
problems, for instance, mechanization. New machines for wine growing
have not been imported since 1990. Another problem is the sorts of
vines. In this connection, the nursery of Khramort is reassuring. At
present, about 20 sorts of vines are grown there, which enables to find
out which sort of grapes is the best to cultivate in Karabakh. Another
problem is chemicals. Fortunately, there is already a laboratory and in
2007 all the chemicals will be tested at the laboratory before going to
consumers. Irrigation and specialists are other core problems. Hence,
despite difficulties there is progress, vineyards grow, production
grows, but the underlying problem is becoming more tangible. Today it
will not sound exaggerated to say that the development of viticulture
depends on processing factories. "In developing viticulture it is
necessary to operate perfectly all the links in this chain, from wine
growing to processors and sale of the final product. If one fails, the
effectiveness of the others will be affected," said Vladimir Zakiyan.