YEREVAN, AUGUST 17, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recapped the My Step For Kotayk Province business forum which was held in the province’s town of Tsakhkadzor.

He noted that certain developments exist in Kotayk in all three priorities which have been declared by the government.

“First is agriculture. And this is what I meant when I was speaking about the industrialization of agriculture. What we saw, particularly regarding the new technology of strawberry production, is the industrialization of agriculture, and fortunately this type of trends exists in Armenia this year and this year strawberry exports increased three times. This is a very serious indicator. It is also an important indicator because this production doesn’t have too much of a dependence from weather conditions. This means that this is already industrial agriculture, which is our direction. In the 21^st century you can’t wait for the weather: will there be hail or not and so on,” Pashinyan said.

The PM noted that the two other directions are tourism and processed industry.

“Here we saw two aparthotel projects which is a new thing in Armenia and I hope will succeed. We also saw processed industry samples, as well as certain technological activity samples. And our objective is to encourage this,” he said.

PM Pashinyan said that the most important role of this kind of forums is to encourage as many citizens as possible to carry out economic activities.

“Our interest isn’t for us to make money, our interest is for you to make money, and therefore we consider this to be our mission. Of course when we say make money we mean doing so legally and through fair competition. This is perhaps the most important message that I would like to address to businessmen. I say again, our goal isn’t for us to make money, our goal is that you make money and yes, get rich and enrich, and enrich not us but the country, the state, the nation,” Pashinyan said.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan