Bakhyt Sultanov : A week of international negotiations

Friends!

The last week of international negotiations was largely devoted to the Uzbek direction. The President of Uzbekistan will arrive in Kazakhstan on a state visit in a few days.

And many of the agreements that we have come to in recent days and that will be the subject of negotiations between the Presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are the result of careful and months-long training of trade diplomats of the two countries.

Our states are the largest economies in the region. And the synergy of our capabilities should become an incentive for the development of the whole of Central Asia.

We discussed this at the III Forum of Interregional Cooperation between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which ended today in Turkestan. The Forum has actually become a "demonstration platform" of the potential of the two economies, business interest in cooperation and opportunities to jointly export with a joint product.

We discussed cross-border cooperation a lot, or rather, the joint implementation of industrial policy. The initial format of the trade and logistics hub "Central Asia", which will be created on the border of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Uzbekistan, after long discussions, we decided to transform into an International Center for Industrial Cooperation. In fact, we are taking a step towards creating a joint export product. The list of such goods is very large. Our business will be able to produce food products together (flour milling products, pasta, confectionery, fat and oil products, meat products), fruit and vegetable products, light industry goods, construction and chemical industries.

We already have many examples of industrial cooperation. For example, machine-building enterprises in Kostanay (factories for assembling Chevrolet cars and SAZ buses are the joint venture of RK-RU) or autoclave aerated concrete in the Tashkent region. More than a thousand enterprises with the participation of Kazakh capital are operating in Uzbekistan today, and there are more than 1,200 companies with Uzbek capital in our country. And many of these joint ventures are export–oriented. This is the same cooperation with an eye to foreign markets. And there are all prospects to deepen it.

As for the development of bilateral trade, there are a lot of ideas for projects in the agro-industrial complex and commodity distribution systems. We are interested in guaranteed supplies of fruit and vegetable products from the south, Uzbekistan - in our root crops and grain. Now we are discussing the possibility of mutual food supplies.

Along the way, we decided to form a trilateral Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan-Russia working group on the point study of Agroexpress. We need to coordinate a lot of issues with customs, the certification system, and develop an algorithm for consolidating and disbanding cargo along the entire route.

The broader format of discussions on bilateral issues was formalized by the protocol of the 19th meeting of the joint Intergovernmental Commission chaired by the Prime Ministers of our countries, during which we reported on the implementation of decisions taken during the previous meeting of the Commission in Tashkent in 2019. Despite the pandemic, 60% of the instructions that are of an exact nature were completed. And the medium-term tasks were clarified taking into account the new realities and formed the basis of the new protocol.

There are still many important issues that we have discussed and continue to discuss with our Uzbek colleagues. The key political decisions and vectors of further movement along the path of economic rapprochement will soon be outlined by Presidents Tokayev and Mirziyoyev.

And more.

The 12th WTO Ministerial Conference under the chairmanship of Kazakhstan will start in Geneva in the coming days. Discussions there will already be about the global trading system and the search for consensus on very sensitive and extremely important issues for all countries. Including the WTO reform.

Follow the news on the MIT and WTO website. I will also try to promptly report the latest news.