On October 7, 2015, Young Barristers attended a conference: “State - Land - Farmer”. The conference considered different issues related to the use of agricultural land, problems related to the agricultural land registration, problems occurring in the process of determination of the status of farmer, farming and investor in agriculture as well as issue of taxes paid on such lands. Archil Kaikatsishvili, the Head of Young Barristers and one of the speakers of the conference, stated that land tax has been increasingly considered to be discriminatory. An article 204 of the Tax Code of Georgia determines: “the annual basic property tax rates on agricultural land and forest land shall be differentiated according to administrative-territorial units and land categories and calculated for 1 ha, in GEL.” In accordance with this rule, e.g. in Signagi Municipality, a citizen shall pay 86 GEL for arable and homestead land for a ha, while before legislative changes, the citizen would pay only 22 GEL, and increase by 400% of the tax was totally unjustified without consideration or examination of the quality or the category of the arable land. Again, Signagi resident shall pay 20 GEL per 1 ha grassland and 16 GEL for pastureland, while in Dedoflisckaro tax for grassland is same 20GEL per ha, however tax for pastureland is 7GEL; in  Akhmeta Municipality, however the taxes for the use of same lands are accordingly 16 GEL and 5 GEL. Accordingly, in such cases it is important to characterize such differentiation and so that it didn’t look discriminatory. He has also stated, that the issue was considered by the Constitutional Court of Georgia as well. he also supported an initiative on the creation of the land code. He is also in favor of strengthening mediation institute in the process of discussing certain disputes in the state agencies.  

The conference was arranged by the Ministry of Agriculture of Georgia and the Association of Women Farmers of Kakheti and it was prepared within the frameworks of the UN project “Enhancing Gender Equality in Georgia”. The project is financed by the Government of Sweden