U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Degnan held a farewell press conference in Tbilisi on August 25. Among other topics, the Ambassador has been asked to comment on the delay of launching direct flights and the free trade agreement (FTA) between the USA and Georgia.
“Both [direct flights and FTA] are really important, and there are two issues that we’ve been working on for some time. There was a lot of progress made on the direct flights before COVID hit, and once COVID hit and the whole airline industry changed as well as some of the travel patterns changed, we basically had to start from scratch in terms of finding an airline that would be interested in making this part of their regular operations. We continue to work on the direct flights. I’m sure anybody who’s flown to the U.S. knows how great that would be to have that.
On the free trade agreement – we simply aren’t working on very many free trade agreements under this administration, but we continue to raise the value of having a free trade agreement discussion with Georgia. It’s important with free trade agreements to be sure it’s good for Georgia as well, because of course, when you have a free trade agreement, you’re opening up your market completely, and sometimes that works to Georgia’s benefit and sometimes it works to the other country’s benefit. So it’s important that this be an agreement that’s beneficial to Georgia as well as to the United States. But even without a free trade agreement, we have very good business trades, business connections between Georgians and American companies. And, we work very hard at the embassy to promote that, to increase that, to connect Georgian businesses with American businesses, and we’ve had some real success in that.
I hope that we will see continued U.S. interest in investing in Georgia. I think there’s some great opportunities here, and we’ve seen energy companies come in, we’ve seen logistics companies come in, we’ve seen agriculture companies come in to work with Georgian businesses. So, we continued to do what we can to increase the amount of FDI between our two countries,” Ambassador Degnan said.
Kelly Degnan arrived in Tbilisi on January 29, 2020, to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Georgia. For the next two years, she will serve as a senior foreign policy adviser in Washington. She will be succeeded as US ambassador by Robin Dunnigan, who until recently was the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
