Shanghai Cooperation Organization invited to consider logistics megaproject

Chairman of the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission Mikhail Myasnikovich has suggested teaming up with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in order to develop a transportation and logistics megaproject, the press service of the Eurasian Economic Commission told BelTA after Mikhail Myasnikovich met with Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Zhang Ming on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on 15 September.

Mikhail Myasnikovich suggested working together to develop a transportation and logistics megaproject able to tie together the entire territory of the Eurasian region. Experts of the two integration associations are expected to discuss the possibility. The Eurasian Economic Union is ready to offer its own approaches to customs transit, digitization of transport corridors for that.

Mikhail Myasnikovich handed over to Zhang Ming materials regarding a project for creating a showcase of national services belonging to the ecosystem of digital transport corridors of the Eurasian Economic Union. A list of priority transport infrastructure projects in countries of the European Union was approved at a session of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council in August, the press service reminded. The list includes seven projects of Eurasian Economic Union countries at various stages of completion. All of them are geared towards the development of Eurasian transport corridors and routes, the transit potential and the transport infrastructure that belongs to the international transport corridors East-West and North-South, including as part of interconnection with China’s Belt and Road initiative.

According to the press service of the Eurasian Economic Commission, participants of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit are supposed to look into a strategic document on developing interrelatedness and effective economic transport corridors. Proposals to create new routes coincide virtually completely with the goals and tasks stipulated by strategic documents of the Eurasian Economic Union.

Mikhail Myasnikovich and Zhang Ming also underlined the need to pool efforts of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in work on a number of priority avenues, including in the sphere of mutual transactions in national currencies and the integration of currency and payment systems on the basis of national currencies for the sake of carrying out transboundary payments, financing trade and investments, and building up interaction between business circles and young people.