BISHKEK: Strategic position and porous borders makes Central Asian state ideal location for trading, and smuggling too.
Now that Kyrgyzstan has joined the Eurasian Economic Union, it is required to impose the same border and customs controls as other members. However, analysts doubt this will have the immediate effect of reducing the lively thriving trade in goods smuggled across the Central Asian state’s borders.
Kyrgyzstan, which shares long borders with China, Kazakstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, has developed into a trading hub since it became independent in 1991. As part of the World Trade Organisation, it benefited particularly from low tariffs with fellow-member China, from where masses of consumer goods were imported and then re-exported to the other Central Asian states.
The trade in wholesale goods has provided an income for hundreds of thousands of households in Kyrgyzstan. And it is not always legal; borders are porous and often ill-defined, and officials are sometimes complicit in the smuggling.
On May 8, Kyrgyzstan formally entered the Eurasian Economic Union, a trading bloc comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakstan and Armenia. Once its accession treaty is ratified by all member states’ parliaments, the Kyrgyz border with Kazakstan will be opened, and the country will have to tighten controls with non-members including China, imposing higher import tariffs on goods brought in from them.
These regulations were designed by the Customs Union, which has existed since 2010 with Russia, Belarus and Kazakstan as its members. The Customs Union was subsumed into the Eurasian Economic Union when it was set up last year with a broader mandate.
The increased customs rates will be accompanied by a drive to tighten border security and clamp down on smuggling.
