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UN develops strategy to promote export of Uzbek agricultural products

Business Materials 14 March 2019 15:54 (UTC +04:00)

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 14

By Fakhri Vakilov - Trend:

The new project Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN will support the preparation of a national strategy to promote the export of certain types of agricultural products in Uzbekistan, Trend reports with reference to the Uzbek media.

A new regional project FAO "Support in the preparation of national strategies to promote the export of certain types of agricultural products in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan" was presented in Tashkent on March 13. The project is being implemented by FAO and the Ministry of Agriculture in Uzbekistan.

FAO office in Uzbekistan states that the project aims to support the government and the private sector in achieving the goals of increasing agricultural exports by analyzing potential export markets in terms of demand and regulating access to them (tariff and non-tariff barriers), as well as assessing the production and selling chain and export capacity. Following the analysis, a draft national export promotion strategy will be developed.

The First Deputy Minister of Agriculture of Uzbekistan Shukhrat Teshaev expressed confidence that the project will contribute to the creation of effective mechanisms for the country's agricultural output to foreign markets.

Among the main issues to be resolved to expand exports of agricultural products are transportation, logistics, storage and provision of high quality and product safety.

“Uzbekistan is landlocked, which leads to higher costs for transporting products to other countries,”. “Another issue is the development of the so-called cold chain during storage and transportation of products (storage, trucks and refrigerated wagons),” senior policy advisor at the FAO Sub regional Office for Central Asia, Sumiter Broca said.

"When exporting to developed countries - Western Europe, China, Japan and others - you deal mainly with large supermarket chains that have very high requirements for quality, safety and the ability to track the origin of goods up to the farm," he stressed.

The project will focus on two selected products and three or four potential markets for each of them. Products will be selected based on the needs of the country and their potential to effectively engage small farmers.

A representative office of FAO in Uzbekistan was opened in 2014. The cooperation framework stress that, until 2022, FAO supports the government in several priority areas, including institutional support, agricultural development and market access, sustainable natural resource management, climate change, and biodiversity.

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