Over the past twenty years Armenia’s forest cover – which based on census data of 1993 has been 334,100 ha, 11.2 percent of the total land area, based on the recent data by GIZ currently is 332,333 ha. The country’s rural population depends heavily on forests for their livelihoods, not only for income from wood production, but also in terms of food from non-wood forest products and services, such as hunting, berries and pastures. This reliance has had a price: unsustainable levels of forest harvesting and overgrazing have led to significant losses in wildlife and timber, exacerbating an already serious erosion and deforestation problem in many parts of the country.

Since the adoption of the “National Forest Programme” in 2005, the Armenian Government has stepped up efforts to improve forest management through a series of institutional and legal reforms, but due to a lack of resources, progress has been slow. In 2012 FAO supported the Government through its Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) focusing on establishing a professional forest nursery and raising awareness on the importance of forests and forest management in order to increase both reforestation and afforestation (the conversion of previously non-forested land to forested land).

The Government provided a nursery covering 15 hectares of land in the town of Hrazdan, to use as a pilot enterprise. The project replaced previously out-of-date equipment to create a new, state-of-the-art forest nursery, enabling nursery staff to use new and updated techniques for seedling production, including bare-root and container seedlings. The newly installed infrastructure included a gas pipeline for a forestry greenhouse – the first of its kind in Armenia.

The project then conducted a series of workshops, in which forest managers and other staff from the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment, NGOs received training on improved nursery techniques, seedling production, natural regeneration and plantation methods, as well as equipment to make the new nursery operational. Special study tours enabled staff from the Ministry of Agriculture to see and learn from the workings of commercial nurseries in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and to view seedlings being transferred from nurseries to forests in Austria.

The new nursery will allow the Hrazdan forest enterprise to grow high-quality seeds of coniferous and hard wood species, increasing the survival rate of young seedlings. The nursery's plantings include seeds from carefully selected forest stands in Armenia. With this kind of increased seedling production, imported plants – often of unknown origin – will not be needed for the Government’s large-scale afforestation and reforestation campaigns.

Staff from the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment are not the only beneficiaries of the project. Local communities are expected to increase their income from nursery employment opportunities and more sustainable development of forest resources.

Co-authors:

Laurent Thomas, Assistant Director-General, Technical Cooperation Department, FAO

Eduardo Rojas-Briales, Assistant Director-General and Head of the Forestry Department, FAO

Tony Alonzi, Officer-in-Charge FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia, FAO Representative in Armenia

Christine Chaperon, Head of the TCP Unit in Technical Cooperation Department, FAO

Project: TCP/ARM/3303