Uzbek Parliament approves roadmap for development of cooperation with EEU

The Uzbek Parliament has approved a roadmap for the development of cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), First Deputy Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade of Uzbekistan Laziz Kudratov said following his talks with the Minister of Trade of the Eurasian Economic Commission Andrey Slepnev.

"Just yesterday, our parliament approved the roadmap for the development of cooperation with the Eurasian Economic Union. A number of issues have been raised in terms of the harmonization of legislation, including customs tariff and non-tariff regulation. Moreover, we are talking about industry, transport, issues of standards and technical regulation, " said Kudratov.

According to him, the Ministry of Investment and Foreign Trade of Uzbekistan has created ad hoc unit two weeks ago, which would deal with cooperation issues with EEU.

Meanwhile, Andrey Slepnev stressed the importance of ongoing negotiations on Uzbekistan`s accession to the WTO. Building legislation in accordance with the rules of the Union, in his opinion, could help bring regulation to the standards adopted in the organization.

"A serious topic is also related to the issues of trade infrastructure. We have a number of projects that may be of interest to Uzbekistan. In particular, we are talking about the Agroexpress project, which allows to minimize costs and speed up the delivery of chilled and frozen products, " noted Slepnev.

The acceleration of logistics, he added, would increase the supply of Uzbek agricultural products, which ultimately could have a positive impact on the hundreds of thousands of workers employed in the industry.

The parties also discussed the implementation of the CIS Free Trade Area Agreement and the abolition of excise taxes. They expressed interest in further discussion of cross-border e-commerce, transport digitalization, technical regulation and the creation of mutual reinsurance mechanisms in trade, and touched upon the procedures for anti-dumping investigations.