Andrey Slepnev, Minister in charge of Trade of the Eurasian Economic Commission, met with Oleg Belozerov, Director General of Russian Railways OJSC. In particular, the meeting touched upon the topic of implementing the Eurasian Agroexpress project as one of its active participants and initiators is a subsidiary of Russian Railways OJSC – Russian Railways Logistics.
"In its first year, the project already demonstrated positive results: there are ten agreements with new participants, the issue of expanding transportation routes is being examined and we have our own fleet of 500 refrigerated containers," said Andrey Slepnev summing up the interim progress. "From January 1 to October 31 2022 482 thousand tons of cargo were transported, including 266.2 thousand tons of refrigerated cargo."
At the same time, according to him, to improve the project efficiency it is necessary to work on increasing competitiveness even further. In view of that, Andrey Slepnev and Oleg Belozerov discussed the steps that might be taken for the future.
Moreover, they considered the issue of organizing digital transport corridors within the Eurasian Economic Union where the central role is also played by Russian Railways OJSC.
"Our main goal is to transition to all-encompassing paperless transportation in terms of carriage and shipping documents. If at least one of them remains in paper format, digitalization makes no sense," believes EEC Minister in charge of Trade.
On the whole, the priority action plan for digitizing freight carriage by rail approved by the disposition of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council last year has been successfully implemented thus far. However, according to Andrey Slepnev, there are a number of implementation issues whose possible outcomes were considered together with Russian Railways OJSC.
As Minister noted, in the near future it is also expected to approve the plan on digitalizing transport corridors with the Chinese party. Russian Railways OJSC came up with a number of initiatives in that regard.
Following the meeting, Andrey Slepnev and Oleg Belozerov agreed to continue the coordinated work in the directions of mutual interest. In addition, EEC and Russian Railways OJSC expressed their willingness to provide necessary support to each other.
