By Bibi Amina Hakimi in TOLOnews Online, Oct 11, 2023 at 10:28 PM
Iran’s economic delegation has reached an agreement with Islamic Emirate’s officials and private sector representatives of Afghanistan on some issues in the areas of trade development.
Iran’s Ambassador to Kabul Hassan Kazemi Qomi, said they have agreed to create an Iran-Afghanistan chamber, trade development, to provide of facilities in the transit sector and investment in the agricultural sector.
“The creation of the Iran-Afghanistan Joint Chamber is one of the ways for introducing the capabilities and relative economic benefits of the two nations. The Chamber of Commerce of the two countries is responsible for the introduction of companies and entrepreneurship of economic banks. This is one of the things we agreed on,” Qomi noted.
Meanwhile, the acting Minister of Industry and Commerce, Nooruddin Azizi, said that the ministry is trying to boost the level of exports with Iran.
“There has always been a big difference in Afghanistan’s trade balance. Our export was about twenty million dollars, and from Iran it was about $2 billion,” Azizi noted.
“We are trying to find the characteristic of each soil of each province and use it according to its characteristic and use the modified eggs and researched eggs from Iran,” the Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Ataullah Omari, said.
According to the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Investment, the cost of transporting goods through Iran is high, and Afghans urged that attention should be paid to reducing the prices.
In the meantime, the Afghanistan Railway Authority wrote on social media that on Tuesday the authority signed an agreement with the Iranian Railway Consortium for the use of the Khawaf-Herat railway.
The authority wrote that, based on the agreement, Iran will send 100,000 tons of goods by this route in the first year and this level will increase by 100,000 tons every year.
At the signing of the agreement ceremony, the head of the Afghanistan Railway Authority, Bakht-ur-Rahman Sharafat, said that the construction of the first phase of the fourth section of the Khawaf-Herat line will start next week.
This comes as acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in a meeting with Sardar Yaqub Ali Nazari, the governor of Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province, emphasized the need for bilateral cooperation between Kabul and Tehran.
Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote on social media that Muttaqi in the meeting said that now security in the country, and commercial and economic cooperation are better than in the past.
Balkhi wrote that in the meeting Yaqub Ali Nazari called for the creation of special teams for work and expertise coordination between the ministries of the two countries as a new step for further cooperation and development.
On Sunday, over 80 Iranian businessmen came to Afghanistan to provide facilities for businessmen and to boost trade between the two countries.
https://tolonews.com/business-185501
