DUSHANBE, August 15, 2012, Asia-Plus — An agreement on a free trade zone within the CIS area must replace hundreds of effective bilateral and multilateral agreements on free trade, Anatoly Dron, the deputy head of the CIS Executive Committee, was quoted as saying by the CIS Executive Committee press center.
According to him, the CIS free-trade-zone agreement is based on principles of the World Trade Organization (WTO and “includes the best elements of international practice.”
Under this agreement, export duties will be frozen at the current level and negotiations on canceling them will start in six months after the document comes into effect. Besides, the sides agree not to use technical, sanitary and phytosanitary measures as barriers for trade.
In the first stages of implementation of the agreement, the sides reportedly agreed to sign a number of international documents that will bring the interstate relations between the CIS nations to a qualitatively new level of economic interaction, the CIS Executive Committee press center said.
We will recall that CIS leaders first signed a protocol on a free-trade zone in 1994, and promises to sign a final agreement have been regular features of CIS summits since the early 2000s. In 2009, a new agreement was achieved to create the free-trade-zone by the beginning of 2011. The 1994 agreement would have covered all twelve then CIS members except Turkmenistan. In October 2011, the new free trade agreement was finally achieved and then signed by eight of the eleven CIS states; Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine at a meeting in St. Petersburg. An agreement was also signed by the CIS prime ministers on the basic principles of currency regulation and currency controls in the CIS at the same meeting. The only CIS states not to sign up to the free trade agreement were Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
The agreement itself had been worked out in May 2011 but the signing had been delayed in order to allow for the resolution of disputes by some Asian members of the CIS. The free trade agreement will eliminate export and import duties on a number of goods but also contains a number of exemptions that will ultimately be phased out. However, corruption and bureaucracy are serious problems for trade in CIS countries.
Russia and Belarus have already ratified the agreement. Ukraine also ratified this document recently and the agreement will come into effect for Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in a month. Armenia and Kazakhstan are expected to ratify the agreement in the near future.
In Tajikistan, the agreement on the CIS free trade zone is still reportedly at the stage of inter-agency coordination, an official source at the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MoEDT) said.
