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At May 19 sitting, the NA Standing Committee on Territorial Administration, Local Self-Government, Agriculture and Environment in the first reading debated the legislative package on Making Addendum to the Law on Social Support of Border Communities and on Making Addendum to the Law on Purchases authored by the NA deputies Sofia Hovsepyan, Anna Grigoryan and Taguhi Tovmasyan.

It is proposed to set the provision of purchase guaranteed by the state of the crop product grown in the lands of agricultural importance being in the administrative territory of the border communities. According to the MPs, the provision should be by the order established by the RA Government, based on the guaranteed purchase contract.

According to the key rapporteur Sofia Hovsepyan, we shall mitigate the tendencies of leaving the emigration or the community as much as possible through solving the employment and social problems in the border communities.

The goal of the draft law is to give social support guaranteed opportunities to the residents of the border communities of Armenia and facilitate the social problems of our compatriots being engaged with the agriculture and improve the economic and financial conditions of the border communities. As a result of the adoption of the package of the draft laws it is expected to raise the degree of the efficiency of the land fund use of the border communities, to increase the concern of our compatriots with the enemy’s neighbourhood for being engaged with agriculture and to promote the development of the border communities.

“How will you understand the fact that the founder of the production is the resident of the border zone or not?” the deputy Tsovinar Vardanyan was interested in the Q & A format.

“If we take into consideration such risks, the we should do nothing in the border communities. If, for example, somebody goes at least to be engaged with gardening on ten hectares of land, there will be jobs there. It is regulated by law, if the resident of the given community does not live there, will not make use of those privileges, i.e. if that person is a resident of Yerevan, then he/she will have relevant registration in that community,” Hovsepyan noted.

The Committee Chair Vahe Ghalumyan was interested in the fact that the department should implement that guaranteed purchase and in what mechanism. According to Sofia Hovsepyan, while delegating the purchase to the private sector the states should give the priority to the border communities.

The RA Deputy Minister of Economy Varos Simonyan did not present the endorsement. He has noted that the character of the guarantee assumed by the state needs specification. It is not clear from the presented substantiation what legal mechanisms of the goods purchase the draft law stipulated by the state will function and how the mentioned product will be realized. Analyses are also not presented on the choice of the product types, their qualitative standards, as well as the entities of having the right of making use of the social support. Voicing the risks, the Deputy Minister noted that in case of the draft law adoption the guaranteed purchases could be carried out with comparatively expensive price, the contract would be granted with non-market mechanism without completion. There is a risk that the information being presented in the phase of contract granting cannot be trustworthy: a contract of guaranteed purchase will be signed with the entity, but the latter will fulfill the contract in other way, proposing crop product grown in the lands of agricultural importance being in the administrative territories of the border communities. The corruption risks will also grow as a consequence of the abovementioned.

As a result of debates, the legislative package was not endorsed by the Committee.