Which Ministry Shall Manage Natural Resources?

Leaders of coalition Georgian Dream speak about unifying of several economic blocks and reduction of relevant committees in the parliament. A coalition leader Davit Saganelidze told journalists that management of natural resources must be disassociated from the ministry of energy. At the same time, Saganelidze believes the management of natural resources shall be disassociated from the environmental ministry too.

“There are a lot of opinions at this stage. However, I think environment protection is so important that it must be disassociated from the natural resources in order not to face interest conflict. Concrete decisions have not been made yet but it is fact that several ministries were created only for concrete persons,” Davit Saganelidze said.

Humanrights.ge asked Rezo Getiashvili, project coordinator of the Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN) to comment on the issues.

Rezo Getiashvili: “Nowadays, all functions of natural resources management are unified into the Ministry of Energy – estimating quotas to use natural resources, auctions and control. Thus, environmental ministry does not have functions at all. Before 2011 reorganization, the Ministry of Environment estimated quotas for natural resources and held auctions. Ministry of Economy used to sing contracts with resource-users but the Ministry of Environment controlled their activities. The interest conflict started after reorganization. In this view, I cannot understand why the ministry of energy should sell state property whilst it is prerogative of the ministry of economy. However, the most essential is that state environmental function must be restituted and the ministry of environment must regain its functions as well. If the new government keeps ministry of energy in the same form, civil society will oppose them. By the way, forest services do not subordinate to the ministry of energy in any foreign state. In some countries, they subordinate to environmental ministry and in others ministry of agriculture control them; somewhere forest service agencies directly subordinate to the country president too. Georgia must not be exception in this direction.”

Elene Chumburidze