Prime Minister Edi Rama held an information meeting with agritourism entrepreneurs, within the framework of the government’s commitment to support the development of this strategic sector, where the existing instruments and the new programmes that will soon be made available to all those who want to be protagonists in this field were presented, with special emphasis on the Mountains Package, which is recording a noticeable increase in interest and applications across the whole territory of the country.

The Prime Minister stressed that agritourism remains one of the main pillars of economic development and sustainable tourism, while underlining that government support will continue to expand through new programmes, including the “Double Your Enterprise” initiative, which aims to strengthen small and medium-sized enterprises in this field.

Special attention was given to the Mountains Package, which enables citizens to invest in their land even in the absence of ownership titles, through a simplified process guaranteed by the state. The Prime Minister clarified that this package is not aimed at large investors but has been created specifically for families and small entrepreneurs who want to develop inherited properties.

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Prime Minister Rama: First of all, thank you very much to the hosts, for this very favorable environment for this meeting.

Secondly, thank you to all the protagonists of agritourism. I know some of them, and perhaps I will get to know some others today, but thank you for leaving your other work in order to listen and to communicate here in this meeting, which aims to help not simply you who are here, but all those who are interested and who perhaps are following us through the screen in order to be informed about the new opportunities that we have and that are or will be made available to all those who want to be protagonists in this field.

I want to begin with the new national program that we are preparing, which will be launched very soon. I believe that by the end of the month we will have the agreement between the Bank of Albania, the second-level banks and the government for a financing line supported by the Albanian government in order to support every project of anyone who has a small or medium-sized enterprise and has the ambition to grow it.

We have called the programme “Double Your Enterprise”, but that does not mean that it necessarily must be doubled. It may be 50 per cent, it may even be tripled, it depends on the project.

This programme will be supported by a direct credit line of the Bank of Albania, which will be processed by the second-level banks on the basis of applications, it will be guaranteed by the Albanian government with a sovereign guarantee and, on the other hand, it will have a lower loan interest rate than commercial loans, naturally, plus it will have a limit of up to 2 million euros.

It will not be possible to access it for large companies, but it will be accessed by start-ups, by, as I said, small and medium-sized enterprises, workshops and certainly also by agritourism businesses that need to grow.

Now naturally, when we speak about the growth of agritourism, I do not simply mean the growth in the number of rooms or in the volume of construction in the territory where the agritourism business is located. The growth of agritourism is also the expansion of its own production and processing capacities outside its own boundaries.

So, an agritourism business may have a vineyard somewhere, may have a farm somewhere, may have a dairy somewhere, may have a jam workshop somewhere, not necessarily in that territory, and if it has such a thing or if it wants to have such a thing, then this is fully sufficient to approach the program.

I believe that the programme comes at the right time. I have had a lot of communication, and very valuable communication, with founders of small and medium-sized enterprises that produce, because here we are talking about production, we are talking about agro-processing, we are talking about exports and naturally you know better than I do that tourism falls under exports and agritourism falls under exports, so this will be the destination of this programme.

On the other hand, of course, there is the Mountains Package.

I believe that each and every one of you, and each and every woman among you, because there are also some women here who are protagonists of this transformation that has happened in our tourism industry through the introduction of agritourism, each one may want to have a network of agritourism businesses, not simply one agritourism business, but a network of agritourism businesses, and for this the Mountains Package also serves.

It is understood that the Mountains Package, unlike how it has been mistreated or distorted in the channels of information, is not a package for large companies, it is not a package for large investors, it has nothing at all to do with these categories and even less is it a package to give territories, public plots for private developments. This is not at all the purpose of the package, this is not at all the object of the package.

The Mountains Package was born from the need to give direction to a very big problem that has its origin far back in time already, in Law 7501 and in the conflict with this law of many families in certain areas of the country, mainly in the north and north-east, but also in other areas that did not recognise Law 7501 as a valid instrument for their land, that did not receive under Law 7501 any kind of land-use certificate, and that redistributed the land immediately after the change of regime on the basis of the old boundaries and do not have problems with one another.

So, the inherited problem is that these people have it impossible to have access to finance and they have it impossible to build in a lawful way, because they do not have a title of ownership.

We made an effort to address this problem with a new law called 20/20, a law which took a lot of time. In fact, the law took a lot of time to be formulated and it did not give us the effect that it should have given, because it presumes written agreement from many, from all those around, who turned out from all the efforts that not only are they in different countries of the world. In short, it did not function as much as we had expected and for this reason the Mountains Package was born.

What does this mean? It means that many Albanians who are in emigration or who are in the city have land, have old houses, which they want to develop, but they have no possibility at all to develop them because even if they have the money they cannot obtain a permit because they do not have the title of ownership.

With the new law called the Mountains Package, this becomes possible by applying directly, by expressing interest before the municipality and by saying: “This land here is mine.” The municipality takes this expression of interest, displays a list for 45 days and makes it public so that anyone who claims the opposite and thinks the opposite and I repeat, this is based very much on the fact that here the law serves those who are on the lands of their forefathers and which have no conflicts and there are many such cases especially in the areas that we have studied and with which we have had many intensive discussions.

Within 45 days, a reasoned objection must come. If it does not come, the list passes to the Municipal Council. The Municipal Council approves it, and the person submits the application. This approval is valid only for this thing. It is valid only to apply; to obtain a permit for a project, it is valid for nothing else at all. You can neither take the land and sell it, nor can you lease it, nothing at all. Nor do you receive a title of ownership. You still do not receive a title of ownership. But you go to the relevant authority, you apply with the project, and you say: this is the project that I want to build.

The project is approved and you build. Only after you have completed the construction, not before, do you receive the title of ownership over that construction and over that investment, you must finish it.

You cannot mortgage the land, because practically it is pointless since at the same time you have the land, but you cannot use it. But you cannot enjoy the title of ownership without investing that land and the law provides that in every case when at some time someone else appears with claim that he is the owner, he goes to court and wins that, you are not dealt with, the state is dealt with. It is then for the state to compensate the person who may appear as claimant of this property.

This is the trajectory that this package follows and it is very pro-business, it is very favorable and it is absolutely based on the inherited right of property. It is not based on “come on, since we have the Mountain Package let us give away some land in the mountains”, because we have no need to do this, this is not at all the purpose and so on and so forth.

I believe that these two things are important for your part, while for all the rest I would say that it is very important for the whole tourism industry to become aware that what seems to have reached the top has only just begun.

The potential of Albania is extraordinary, it is still very underused and the possibility for Albania to generate much more income from tourism is very great and when I say to generate much more income from tourism, I do not mean that 35 million tourists should come here because we do not need them. We do not need to become an overloaded destination of mass tourism, which is a tourism that brings many people, but who are not high consumers, they are low consumers, in the sense that they consume little, and we should aim at those who consume a lot and agritourism businesses can become, so to speak, the transformers also in this direction, by increasing the quality of service first of all and by keeping a balance with prices, secondly.

Many people in the tourism industry today in Albania do not understand it, at least if you look at the list of prices. It is not that I am questioning your intelligence, but if you look at the list of prices in many points in Albania, starting from Vlora, which is a phenomenon in this case, and you look at the investment, you think that this person who made the whole investment does not understand what he is doing to his own investment with the list of prices that he puts in front of you. He cuts off his future by making lists, menus or room-rate boards with that hunger to earn today also what you will earn tomorrow. In fact, you become the gravedigger of your own investment.

It is a tragedy that has happened to quite a few places and from which one must learn. If you invest in a restaurant made of straw and you do not mind the amount that you have invested, you can play this game and gain what you will gain today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, then when no one comes anymore, you leave the straw there and go away.

At the moment when people, tourists, come to a destination with great force because they discover it and then start leaving dissatisfied by the quality, service and price ratio and by the offer ratio, meaning the capacity of the offer, because they do not come to Albania today as to a place where one spends extraordinarily much, they come to Albania because they say: there are still reasonable prices. Then those places, you who deal with this work can search them, can see them on the internet, turn into, God forbid, graveyards, no one comes anymore and the hotels go bankrupt, the investments go to ruin and to recover that blow to reputation that you inflict on yourself takes many years and there are countries, there are places, where the thing has never returned because other destinations appear and so on and so forth.

So at this point one must be very careful and one must be strategic, not for the people because I know that when we chose capitalism we chose a system where whoever wants to profit will profit even more, but for yourselves, for your own interest and here I do not have it simply with you because I have no reason to think that you set prices in an illogical way, but I have it with those who do set illogical prices. I have it with the protagonists of tourism in Vlora and with others afterwards, because it is a very big problem and the last thing that I will preach here is the culture of service, the smile, the creation in the other of that which we all call Albanian hospitality.