Author: Blake Morgan

ASTANA – Bilateral trade between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is showing dynamic growth, with a 72% increase to $438 million recorded in 2022, Kazakh First Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said at the 12th meeting of the Intergovernmental Kazakh-Turkmen Commission on economic, scientific, technical and cultural cooperation on May 15, reported the Kazakh Ministry of Trade and Integration’s press service. The meeting, co-chaired by Sklyar and Turkmen Deputy Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers Batyr Atdayev, resulted in a number of agreements in the agriculture, energy, transport, and logistics sectors. Kazakhstan offered to establish close cooperation between the KazakhExport export insurance…

The Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, TAQA, has signed agreements with the government of Uzbekistan worth $3 billion to invest in the Central Asian country’s power sector. The investment includes the construction of a new power station with a capacity of approximately 1.5 gigawatts. According to Saudi Arabia’s Al-Sharq TV, under this new partnership TAQA expects to conduct all work related to plant design, financing, engineering, procurement, outsourcing, testing, ownership and operation. TAQA said that another agreement has been signed as part of exploring investment opportunities in a number of existing power plants and other new gas-fired plants with a total…

Heads of the foreign ministries of the member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have arrived in Uzbekistan to participate in the regular meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the CIS in Samarkand, Sputnik Uzbekistan reported. There are about ten matters on the agenda of this summit, regarding various domains of cooperation in the territory of the CIS. An exchange of views between the FMs of the CIS countries on urgent international and regional topics is planned. The CIS was established in December 1991, after the collapse of the USSR. The founders of this commonwealth are…

Deputy Minister of Agriculture of Uzbekistan Umid Mamadaminov held a meeting with the leadership of the cotton and textile cluster created on the basis of investments of the South Korean POSCO International corporation during which they discussed new investment agricultural projects. During the meeting, the cluster management presented plans to expand activities for the next three years and implement investment projects in the Tashkent, Kashkadarya, and Fergana regions with a total value of $196 million. The parties discussed the allocation of areas for cotton cultivation in areas where it is planned to implement new projects, as well as the use…

According to EastFruit analysts, Ukraine was the largest supplier of apples to the Uzbek market in January 2023, despite the ongoing Russian military aggression, complex and expensive logistics, and the multiple difficulties that Ukrainian growers face now. In January 2023, apple exports from Ukraine to Uzbekistan reached 360 tonnes and exceeded the export volume in January 2022 by 24%, when Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine had not yet begun. It is interesting to note that Ukrainian apples ousted the apples from Iran, Moldova, and Turkey from the Uzbek market in January. Deliveries of fresh apples from these countries to Uzbekistan…

According to EastFruit analysts, Uzbekistan sharply increased the imports of fresh apples in 2022. They rose by 2.5 times over the year and reached a record 26 700 tonnes. Uzbek importers purchased the main volume of apples in 2022 from Iran – more than 15 700 tonnes. Thus, apple imports from Iran to Uzbekistan increased by 3.7 times over the year, although Iran itself sharply reduced the total volume of apple exports in 2022 due to a crop failure. The second in the ranking of apple suppliers to the Uzbek market is Poland, which accounted for 15% of all imports or 4…

We recently visited a handful of cities in Uzbekistan, namely Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as the Aral Sea, which are part of the historical Silk Road route. The trip took more than two weeks and over 3,300km to complete, via plane, car and train. Our journey began in the capital city of Tashkent, where we flew to Nukus and then hired a private vehicle to get to the Aral Sea. The drive was not smooth as the roads were in bad condition. But still, we managed to get to Moynaq, which is an abandoned harbour near the Aral…