At the upcoming talks in Baku between President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, the discussion will be focused, among other things, on the development of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), Report informs referring to inbusiness.kz.
Azerbaijan is becoming a "new window to Europe" for Kazakhstan, and it is through Baku that an alternative route for oil produced in Kazakhstan will lie.
Thus, according to Yerlan Absatov, director general of the Union of Transport Workers of Kazakhstan KAZLOGISTICS, the Trans-Caspian route is quite viable. "If in 2017 we transported 500 containers along the Trans-Caspian route, by the end of 2021 their number has increased to 25,000. So there is a positive trend," he said.
He noted that the capacity of container traffic through the South Caucasus is six million tons, and today the load has reached 95 percent. They mainly bring grain, coal, metal and consumer goods from China. He added that "the growth of traffic is a clear signal for the expansion of the current capacity of the Trans-Caspian route."
The main issue in the negotiations is the adoption of a single through tariff for transportation along this route.
According to the director of the Department of Transport Policy and Infrastructure of the Ministry of Industry and Infrastructure Development of Kazakhstan, Zeinolla Akhmetzhanov, it is the adoption of a single unified tariff that will ensure the competitiveness of the Trans-Caspian corridor in the future.
The parties interested in the route in April of this year agreed on the size of the unified tariff rate.
"We plan that as part of the upcoming visit of our head of state to Baku, two memorandums on transit transportation will be signed at the level of the ministries of the two countries," Akhmetzhanov said.