Kazakhstan joins Ashgabat Agreement: Kazakhstan’s national railways company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) has joined with its counterparts in Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in working towards the development of a North-South transport corridor that will give landlocked Central Asian countries access to the Indian Ocean via Oman and Iran. The initiative was launched in 2011 and is known as the Ashgabat Agreement. According to KTZ the volume of rail shipments between the agreement’s co-signatories reached 25m tons in 2014 – a 10% increase on the previous year – 41% of which was export cargo from Kazakhstan. It anticipates that trade between Kazakhstan and Oman, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will exceed 40m tons by 2020.
Source: Times of Central Asia