Abstract
At the current stage of development, special attention should be focused on maximum realization of the country's food potential. It is important for Georgia to overcome food shortage, to provide the population with affordable, diverse, harmless, high-quality and sufficient food. Industrialization of agriculture and its transformation into a high-tech industry stand as guarantee that the country will meet its food requirements. In addition, it is important to take into account that not only expansion of agricultural land is limited, but on the contrary, it is even decreasing due to escalation of urbanization process. The solution lies in the high-performance use of agricultural lands and increasing of per hectare yield. There is only one way to achieve this goal – land use efficiency. In order to make full use of land and secure high yields of agricultural crops, additional human labor and agro-cultural measures are often required to give a specific soil the properties that other soils possess under the best natural conditions. Such lands require significant improvement (melioration). The proposed paper provides an analysis of the current state of agricultural hydromelioration in Georgia. Economic innovative proposals for the use of agromelioration have been developed on the basis of generalization of international best practices. This research dwells upon the experience of foreign countries from the point of view of institutional arrangement. We tried to select the countries based on the principle that the best practices of all continents should be represented. From Latin American countries, we studied the institutional arrangement of Mexico in the field of irrigation, from the European countries – the experience of Portugal, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania and Ukraine; on the Eurasian continent target country was Russia, in the Caucasus - Armenia, in Asia Minor - Turkey, in the Middle East - Israel, in Asia - China, South Korea and Japan, on the Australian continent – Australia proper. Such variegated selection showed us the specifics of institutional structures in different countries, despite their varying development histories and paths taken in the field of irrigation and drainage. From the point of view of institutional arrangement, several distinct classification markers have been identified, highlighting similarities between specific countries and allowing to group them according to these markers. In particular, we can group countries according to the type of institutional arrangement in terms of management - centralized or decentralized.