On 20th March 2019, the Stakeholders´ coordination meeting on Food Safety was initiated by the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Georgia in cooperation with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The meeting was attended by the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Environment Protection and Agriculture, representatives of National Food Agency, Administration of the Government of Georgia and 10 donors active in the Food safety sphere. The stakeholder meeting was organized with the aim to identify government’s needs, to map current activities and set up the future mechanism of effective coordination of donors’ and governments’ activities. Deputy Minister, Mr Giorgi Khanishvili mentioned the importance of food safety, protection of Georgian customers, harmonization of the legislation with the EU and thanked the donor community for the support in this matter. The Ministry took an initiative to organize the next coordination meeting in upcoming months.

The Stakeholder meeting was preceded by a conference “Future of Food Safety in Georgia” organized by People in Need as a part of the project “Phytosanitary Reform - Outreach Component”, co-financed by Czech Development Agency and USAID. The conference brought together key stakeholders from the agricultural sector to discuss the future of food safety in Georgia after three years of implementing the DCFTA agreement. The conference was initiated by welcome speech of Chargé d´Afffaires Jiří Preclík, followed up with the presentations by UKZUZ (Central Institute for Supervising and Testing in Agriculture from the Czech Republic), People in Need and other stakeholders. The conference was closed by the speech of Mr Jan Černík, development councilor.