Page 16 - Small Stans Outlook 2024

Turkmenistan replaced Uzbekistan as the largest exporter of tomatoes in Central Asia.
A doubling of Turkmenistan’s greenhouse land coverage would take it to around 1,400-1,500 hectares. Nearly all greenhouses in the country specialise in tomato production.
EastFruit analysts have noted that Turkmenistan is mainly reliant on Russia for tomato export sales.
One worry is that if export markets are not expanded and diversified, a glut of Turkmen tomatoes could soon be found on the domestic market, with growers facing squeezed profit margins.
However, Andriy Yarmak, an economist at the Investment Centre of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), observed: “Fortunately, in 2022 Turkmenistan was able to export [its] first significant volumes of tomatoes to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It is this direction of export diversification that should be a priority for the country. However, these markets have high requirements for quality, safety and packaging of products, so now it is important for Turkmenistan to invest not into production volumes, but into improving quality, sorting and developing efficient logistics. Optical sorting of tomatoes, for example, should already be standard equipment in every large greenhouse operator if they want to diversify exports.”
Market experts are encouraging Turkmenistan to explore the possibility of exporting winter tomatoes to the European Union by raising industry standards.
4.0 Infrastructure
4.1 Infrastructure - Kyrgyzstan
Last year brought growing hopes that construction of the long-envisaged China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway would begin within months, after around two decades of waiting. But by the end of 2023 it was clear that China, facing economic struggles, has not after all prioritised the project and that the financing is at this point just not there. Kyrgyz officials talk hopefully of financing plans being hammered out in the near future, but there is no real indication that this will turn out to be the case. As things stand, Kyrgyzstan is short of several billion dollars to make the CKU happen, a huge engineering challenge given the required route through the Tian Shan mountains.
Much more realistic is the development of a multimodal transport corridor running from Russia to Kyrgyzstan via a route that crosses the Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Importantly for the three Central Asian countries on the route, the corridor would allow for trade flows to and from
16 Small Stans 2023
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