Local government officials and seafood companies located in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang are aiming to make their home province a hub for Eurasian seafood trading, creating new seafood trade flows with the Arabian Sea, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
Urumqi, the regional capital, has become an increasingly important trading hub for central Asian wholesalers and traders from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and the Caspian states. Each of those areas is serviced by regular, direct flights, facilitating the growth of cross-border trading activity. One firm, Xinjiang Tianyun Organic Agriculture, ships fish and crab out of the region aboard China Southern Airlines’ regular services.
As proof of this growth, imports of freshwater fish from neighboring Kazakhstan into Xinjiang increased rapidly in the first five months on 2019. Almost 1,000 tons of freshwater fish, mostly bream and perch, came through the Khorgos border crossing – the main commercial trading post on the China-Kazakhstan border – from January to May 2019; a 15-fold increase on the same period in 2018, according to Chinese Customs statistics.
The region’s budding aquaculture sector has been aided by government subsidies, labeled as “poverty alleviation” in one of the poorer regions of China. But not all investment is coming from the government. The Dongbao Group in Urumqi, which sells imported and local seafood, recently completed Xinjiang Hai Dong International Food Logistics Port at a cost CNY 2 billion (USD 283.7 million, EUR 256.1 million). The giant trading center will be a centerpiece of the company’s plan to reach further into Kazakhstan and westwards to Eurasian markets.
Urumqi is marketed as a trading hub for Central Asia in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) blueprint for global trade, and Dongbao’s marketing materials make frequent reference to the BRI, which aims to integrate Central Asia and Eastern Europe into China’s economy. In fact, Dongbao’s expansion plans lean heavily on the Chinese government’s plan to link China to the Arabian Sea via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, one of the BRI’s constituent parts.
Dongbao, which has a 90 percent share of the frozen foods distribution sector in the sprawling province, wants to tap into rising freshwater production of aquaculture in the region and ride the BRI and improving transportation infrastructure to bring both Chinese and imported seafood further westwards into Eurasia.
Dongbao’s customers include buyers picking up salmon for catering firms in Almaty, the commercial capital of Kazakhstan, which is a 10-hour drive from Urumqi.
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