ASTANA (TCA) — Kazakhstan and Belarus initialed Cooperation Development Roadmap for 2017-2018 at the meeting of Kazakhstan-Belarus Intergovernmental Commission for Trade and Economic Cooperation held in Gomel, Belarus last week, the official website of the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan reported.
At the meeting, First Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Bakytzhan Sagintayev emphasized that it is important to increase cooperation with Belarus in the agro-industrial sector.
“Considering the existing potential, we need to enhance our partnership in this area. It is crucial to find new drivers of our relations, new points of interaction. For instance, we should solve the issue of establishing joint sugar beet and corn producing enterprises,” Sagintayev said.
In his words, Kazakhstan and Belarus have already been interacting in the production of agricultural machinery, in crop varieties testing and legal protection of agricultural crops varieties.
He stressed that Kazakhstan is a large agrarian country. “We possess the best conditions for agricultural sector development. The area of croplands in Kazakhstan totals 215 million hectares, which is more than four percent of the world resources,” the Kazakh First Deputy Prime Minister said.
According to Kazakhstani statistics, in 2015 the trade turnover between Kazakhstan and Belarus decreased by 37.7 percent and amounted to 520 million US dollars.
According to Sagintayev, the negative trade dynamics was mainly due to the deterioration of the global economic situation and the decline in prices for energy sources.
