An aquaculture company located near China’s border with Kazakhstan has secured licenses to export salmon raised from eggs imported from Alaska.
Xinjiang Tian Yun Organic Farming Ltd. claims to be the first from the region of Yili to be licensed by Chinese authorities to export seafood. The license was granted by the customs bureau in Yining, the main city in Yili region in Xinjiang Province.
As of December 2016, the company had imported hundreds of thousand of Alaskan salmon eggs and grown them to market size in the Kashi River basin, according to China Ag magazine.
Established in 2014, Tian Yun Organic hasn’t stated the main export destinations for its goods, though the company’s location puts it closer to the Kakakh capital of Almaty than any major Chinese city.
Separately, the China Xinjian Group (XPCC) has launched a CNY 80 million (USD 11.7 million, EUR 10.5 million) freshwater fish and shrimp aquaculture project in 2017 targeting the Kazakh market. The group has its roots in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a paramilitary group established in the 1950s, when it was created to impose Chinese control on the sprawling westerly region of Xinjiang, a Chinese name meaning “New Frontier.” It recently expanded significantly into crayfish production.
Yining authorities have been keen to build up the region as a major trading zone between China and Kazakhstan. It has concentrated its efforts on in the border town of Khorgos, which has become a major hub for traders from across Central Asia, who can enter vast malls on the Chinese side of the border without needing a visa. The town is a lynchpin in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to connect China to global marketplaces with new infrastructure.
With its vast landmass, Kazakhstan has positioned itself as food exporter. But despite China’s efforts to shift population into Xinjiang and to build infrastructure westwards, supply chains between the two countries are still minimal.
Nevertheless, almost 1,000 metric tons of freshwater fish – mostly bream and bass (perch) – came through the Khorgos border crossing between January and May 2019, representing a 15-fold increase over the same period in 2018, according to Chinese Customs statistics.
Long a major source of oil and gas, Xinjiang has has begun to assert itself as a supplier of agricultural goods to China’s urban east coast, trading on an image as an organic-producing region. Internationally, however, the region has become synonymous with a security campaign against the native Uyghur people, a Muslim Turkic group.
Despite intermittent anti-China protests in Kazakhstan as a response, Kazakhstan is increasingly joining the economic orbit of its eastern neighbor, which is buying increasingly large volumes of Kazakh oil and gas. The relationship is further complicated by Kazakhstan’s membership of the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEU), a bloc wary of China’s lower cost exports wiping out manufacturing activity across the former Soviet Union.
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