{"id":280015,"date":"2017-04-13T17:54:11","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T13:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/epress.am\/?p=280015"},"modified":"2017-04-13T19:57:35","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T15:57:35","slug":"unpaid-grape-farmer-says-he-sees-no-future-in-armenia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2017\/04\/13\/unpaid-grape-farmer-says-he-sees-no-future-in-armenia.html","title":{"rendered":"Unpaid Grape Farmer Says He Sees No Future in Armenia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gevorg Harutyunyan, a grape farmer from the Ararat province village of Kaghtsrashen who is still owed AMD 1 705 000 by a local winery for produce sold in 2015, today picketed outside the government building in Yerevan in the hope of meeting with Armenia\u2019s Culture Minister Armen Amiryan, who during the pre-parliamentary election period <strong><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><a style=\"color: #003366;\" href=\"http:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2017\/03\/23\/armenias-prime-minister-avoids-meeting-with-protesting-grape-farmers.html\">had promised<\/a><\/span><\/strong> to familiarize himself with the issue and help the Kaghtsrashen farmers.<\/p>\n<p>Note, the Kaghtsrashen grape farmers \u2013 who after an unusually rich harvest in the fall of 2015 had to sell their grapes to the local Vinar winery for as little as 40 drams per kilogram \u2013 have fruitlessly been fighting for nearly two years and staging numerous demonstrations outside government offices in Yerevan to get the winery to finally pay for the procured produce.<\/p>\n<p>Today Harutyunyan did not get to meet with Amiryan after all; he did, however, manage to have a short conversation with Agriculture Minister Ignati Arakelyan, according to whom, \u201cVinar has nothing and cannot pay the grape farmers, so we\u2019ll have to find another way to <strong><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><a style=\"color: #003366;\" href=\"http:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2017\/01\/13\/armenias-government-will-not-cover-winerys-debt-to-grape-farmers.html\">pay off the debt<\/a><\/span><\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to Epress.am, the farmer said if officials keep constantly lying, the villagers will start resorting to extreme measures. \u201cI don\u2019t know what else can be done here. I might just sell everything I own, pay off my loans and leave the country with my family,\u201d Harutyunyan added.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today Harutyunyan did not get to meet with Amiryan after all; he did, however, manage to have a short conversation with Agriculture Minister Ignati Arakelyan, according to whom&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[66037,66047,65979],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}