ICARE at The Annual Eurasian Food Security Conference

The Annual Eurasian Food Security Conference is an important event, which promotes food and nutrition security in the Eurasia region. This year the conference was held in Armenian National Agrarian University.This conference brings together around 150 participants annually. The purpose of the conference is to create a platform, where experts from regional and international organizations, scientific and educational institutions, and various governments can address regional food security concerns.

       
During those days multiple topics were discussed regarding regional food security and the factors affecting this such as Digital Agriculture, Climate Change, Natural Resource Management and so forth.  The Eurasian delegates had a chance to represent their own experience of how they fight against this global issue on the country level and what protective policies they have adopted so far directly influencing this existing concerns promoting innovative and sustainable agricultural practices.
Research director of ICARE Foundation Lusine Tadevosyan also participated in this major event and presented the econometric model of factors affecting milk productivity in Armenia.
She introduced the study results of 414 sampled farms showing the gap that currently exist in that production capacity of observed dairy processing organizations. Ms. Tadevosyan mentioned that farms are unperformed due to lack of demand of dairy products and lack of milk in the market. Majority of the processors produced more than 4 types of dairy products. A few organizations from the sample were running their own raw milk production in order to have milk volume needed for dairy production under their direct control.
Other highlighted barriers for the dairy sector by the processors were quality of milk, lack of specialists, market size and unequal competition, no governmental support and subsidy. And there were many suggestions by the processing organizations for overcoming those barriers: from increasing farmers’ literacy to tax advantages for the processors.
Ms. Tadevosyan emphasized the importance of dairy sector in food security locally and globally making the top recommendations, which will have a direct influence on sustainable processing of dairy products.