Since the purveying season has started, what happened today in the morning in the Ararat marz will be repeated during this summer and autumn. The village farmers came out on the highway and demanded that their apricot is purveyed not for 400, but 500 Armenian drams. The Minister of Agriculture also promised that it would be so. In other words, a state official committed that he will force the buyer to purchase at a price convenient to the seller. Moreover, both the seller and the buyer are private individuals and organizations. Consequently, the state has the leverages to guide the business entities to buy or sell a commodity at this-or-that price by means of asking, demanding, threatening, or I do not know how else.
And why not, for AMD 1000 or 1000 dollars. If the pricing in our country is arbitrary and it depends on the will of a public official, any price may be announced. Simply in this case I or a foreign consumer will not be able to buy dried fruits or jam prepared by purveyor. No one can force us to buy at a higher price. In this case, theoretically it is not excluded that the purveyors make a demonstration and demand that the Minister of Agriculture force farmers to sell their apricot at 300 drams. By the way, recently, similar demonstrations were held by village farmers in Shirak marz. They were complaining that the purveyors had lowered their prices for milk intake. But wait … The price for dairy products in the shops has gone higher. Therefore, the milk at the farmers is reduced, but in the supermarkets, it has become expensive. Hence, the problem is in somewhere else. And I assume where. At a superficial glance, one may assume that the state “does not stand up for” the farmers, and if it distributes money to them or force the purveyor to buy their products at high prices, and impose the banks to lower the loan interests, then everything will be regulated. But, so we will go deeper into the swamp. The problem is not the market relations or lack of state regulation, but rather the contrary, the absence of such relations.
The Minister has a chance to make the purveyors to raise their price just because the companies are private only by the name, but, in reality, they are actually subjected to high-ranking state officials, because they are created by and belong to the latter. And that is why they quote an arbitrary, non-market prices because they are operating in a non-competitive environment.
Making money injections here and there, interfering in the relations between the buyer and the seller can provide only temporary results. It’s not something like extinguishing the fire here and there. But the fires will flame up more often and more widespread and not only in agriculture. So long, until the problem is resolved in a so-called fashioned language “systemic” solution. And the solution is very simple: to separate the business from the state service, eliminate monopolies. It is clear on paper, but hard in reality.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
