YEREVAN. – There is no Karabakh wheat; next year we will have a bread problem. Armenia’s former Prime Minister Hrant Bagratyan, who is an economist by profession, stated this during a press conference on Monday.

"Today the trade, the cargo turnover is stopped [in Armenia], 15 percent of the [country’s] foreign trade isn’t there. There is no Karabakh [(Artsakh)] wheat; next year we will have a bread problem. We have 70 thousand refugees from Karabakh; we must build houses [for them]. I am confident that they [Armenia’s authorities] will make wrong decisions here as well. I am confident that [PM Nikol] Pashinyan will do the worst of all the solutions. I say there will be a food problem in the country later. It will be a hungry situation in March, April, May. I see little good. We have serious land losses that will be felt in the production of wheat, meat, milk," Bagratyan said.

According to him, Armenia is losing resources with every surrendered territory and village, this could lead to a food crisis in the country, and the Central Bank “melts” the country’s reserves every day—as it spent $500 million last October alone.

Bagratyan stressed that if Pashinyan remains Prime Minister, what he has said will come true one by one.

According to Armenia’s ex-PM, the first step in the country should be to sign a document on borders. Also, it is necessary to make tax reform, create agricultural cooperatives, and open a new nuclear power plant. "The army has no problem arming itself; Russia and China will fully arm us. The problem is that we do not know how to shoot from weapons. In my previous programs, I had stated that a conscript should receive an average salary; the work of defending the homeland is no less important than the average work that people do," Hrant Bagratyan concluded.