The FAO GCP (Government Cooperative Programme) agreement was signed with the Republic of Armenia on December 10, 2012, with responsibility for implementation of the project assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture.

The project inception mission was completed in early May 2013 and project team in Armenia has since developed a detailed Operational Manual (OM) which sets out the following areas of focus:

• Completion of a national inventory of obsolete stocks of pesticides across Armenia;
• Safeguarding and collection of these stocks into a central storage facility (possibly the storage to be developed under a parallel UNDP/GEF project);
• The environmentally sound disposal of the stocks, collected to central storage in accordance with requirements of the Basel and Stockholm Conventions;
• A complete review of pesticide legislation in Armenia to identify areas of possible strengthening of national regulations;
• A review of the pesticide life-cycle in Armenia to identify areas where more support should be provided to ensure implementation of the Code of Conduct to the distribution and use of pesticides;
• A review of the current use of HHPs and development of a plan to phase out their use in Armenia through the promotion of lower risk alternative pest control systems; and
• Development of a national awareness and communications plan linked to the above activities.