(Interpressnews.)

TBILISI, DFWatch–Georgia is facing a demographic and agricultural crisis as more than 100,000 rural residents have left villages over the last decade.

Between 2014 and 2024, the rural population fell by about 6.3%, dropping from 1,591,181 to 1,490,900, reducing the share of villagers from 43% to 38% of Georgia’s total population.

This exodus is so detrimental, it is reshaping the country’s economic and political makeup and could decide future elections. Agriculture remains a key sector, employing 17% of workers yet contributing only 7% to GDP. Urban average incomes are nearly 78% higher than in rural areas. Without crops to sell, many farmers are abandoning farms in search of city jobs or migrating abroad.

Professor Anzor Meskhi illustrates the challenge: Georgian onions and strawberries are often undercut by cheaper imports from Turkey and Armenia, which benefit from protective policies, leaving local producers unsold and destitute. He also notes the long-term abandonment of land—with 700 villages now empty, 800 home only to elderly residents, and over half the homes in some areas labelled “for sale.” In the Racha province, the population has plummeted from 77,000 to 22,000.

Analyst Jumber Panchulidze adds that rural areas lack labor and mechanization. Without affordable equipment or subsidies, 60% of farmland remains unused. The poor condition of key faclities like schools, clinics and roads makes rural revival unlikely, eroding social cohesion with potential for impacting electoral outcomes.

A key fault line in that regard is how to best provide export markets for small-scale farmers. The EU’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with Georgia, implemented in 2016, has not delivered significant benefits for rural farmers. The EU market remains difficult to access due to high compliance costs and competition from subsidized European agribusiness undercutting local produce.

Meanwhile, Russia offers a more accessible, profitable, and logistically feasible market, which has remained accessible due to the governing GD party’s policy of staying on the sidelines of the sanctions war. Most opposition parties argue for joining the Western sanctions, which would be followed by severing of trade relations with Moscow, leaving the Georgian rural small farmer with even worse export prospects than today, unless the EU offers a form of favored trade quotas like Ukraine was granted.