To put in perspective the administrative burdens on transit vehicles, in 2008, the Agribusiness Competitiveness Center in Kyrgyzstan conducted a monitoring study that documented all the administrative barriers and informal payments faced along this Kyrgyz corridor by a 19-ton refrigerated truck of black cherries from the rural Markaz district in Batken region.<sup>8</sup> To get the required documents to ship the truck, the local custom body asked 700$ (allegedly to informally pay financial police, local government, law enforcement bodies, public prosecution department and other local authorities). The services of a Customs broker in Bishkek would only cost 200$. The only legal requirements are a land plot ownership certificate (to indicate the origin of the product) and a purchase certificate, both free. On the way from Osh to Bishkek, informal payments were made at the following checkpoints:

- Frontier veterinary quarantine (245 km away from Osh), whose purpose is to prevent the expansion of animal morbidity: the trucker paid the equivalent of 7$ so that the control agent would not open the refrigerator.

- General road directorate (280 km away from Osh): official fees are 60$, but the trucker paid an unofficial fee of 30$.

- Axle load road control terminal in Jala-Abad region (295km away from Osh): the officer estimated an overload of one ton and asked for 7,000KGS. The trucker paid informally 100$.

- Chychkan terminal (419 km away from Osh): the terminal is an ecological control terminal. The trucker made an informal payment of the equivalent of 24$ to pass.

Incredibly, all the above costs are borne on the domestic leg of the journey for a Kyrgyz truck. The amount foreign carriers would have to pay is reported to be almost double that. Now, add to this the equivalent of 750$ paid informally while transiting in Kazakhstan (passport registration, load registration, certificate registration, transit documents (TIR carnets), and various documents checking and registration), and the 295$ in Russia before reaching the delivery place. All these informal payments can easily add to about 5 percent of the value of product transported.

Truckers can face many other challenges, one being the duration of stay necessary within a transit or destination country. Consider a truck going all the way to the European Union. Since 2004, the number of EU members has significantly increased with the accession of many Eastern and Central European countries, while duration of stay for a truck remained the same. In order to follow rules of transportation (required time for relaxation for drivers for instance) and taking into account unexpected queries, traffic jams, loading/unloading (taking between 2 and 6 days), holidays and distance (4 days to cross Poland), it could take about 20 days for Central Asian trucks’ drivers to be present in European Union countries while the official permission is 10 days and visa extension is not guaranteed.

Finally, in the absence of a guarantee, convoying is usually required for customs transit under the national road transit systems in Kazakhstan and Russia. A major problem with convoying is that the fee for the service is rather high. According to the existing regulation, customs convoying rates range from 14$ for less than 50km to 900$ for more than 2000km in Kazakhstan.<sup>9</sup> In Russia, it ranges from 60$ for less than 50km to 30$ per 100km beyond 200km, with a minimum of 180$. Usually one customs escorts is convoying less than 10 transport vehicles. A side effect of convoys is that accumulating sufficient vehicles to make up a convoy takes time, more than a day at light-traffic border crossing points. Furthermore, all the vehicles in a convoy arrive at the exit border crossing point together, thus creating an uneven workload for customs at that point and causing significant processing delays.

> 8 Agribusiness Competitiveness Center (2008), “Research Monitoring of Existing Barriers Restraining Promotion of Products and Trade Development in the Region”, Bishkek (2008). 9 Regulation #669 from 07/08/2003

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