In bid to boost trade, UN helps to tighten transport links in northeast Asia

A three-country meeting this week in China has agreed to streamline customs procedures, coordinate transit routes and establish a common regulatory framework - moves meant to boost export capabilities and living standards in northeast Asia, United Nations officials said today.

UN agencies have worked with China, the Russian Federation and Mongolia to improve transport in this resource-rich but geographically isolated sub-region. On the basis of a 1997 meeting in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar on transit transport cooperation, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) helped to draft a sub-regional agreement on improving transport links.

The two-day tripartite talks in Qingdao, China, which concluded today, moved those countries decisively closer to finalizing the Draft Transit Traffic Framework Agreement, according to a UN official at the meeting.

In addition, the Framework Agreement is "part of the effort to implement the Almaty programme of action [for landlocked and transit developing countries] adopted at the historic UN conference in Kazakhstan last August," Anwarul K. Chowdhury, the UN High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, said in a message delivered to the Qingdao meeting.

At the Kazakhstan conference, low-income landlocked countries and the countries that stand between them and the sea agreed to work together to reduce the age-old disadvantage of geographical isolation and lack of access to deepwater ports.

The main export links to the outside world for Mongolia, for instance, are situated 750 miles away in northeast China near Qingdao, and thousands of miles westward in Central Europe. Improved transit transport cooperation would benefit not only the export capacity of Mongolia, according to the UN, but also the development of integrated sub-regional markets.