Bananas in the desert

Despite its alleged indifference to the fruit, Turkmenistan aspires to become a regional banana power. What does this admittedly niche fact signify for the future of global trade?

People in Turkmenistan very seldom eat bananas.

Turkmens on average consume a paltry 160 grams of the fruit per year, according to analysts at East-Fruit, a website covering the produce industry.

That puts the country in last place in global banana consumption.

This discovery was enough for one outlet to allude waggishly, if a little confusingly, given the context, to Turkmenistan’s “bananas regime.”

But the factoid does offer a revealing insight into the country’s heavily self-induced isolation, and how that affects its trading posture.

For anybody tempted to stop reading, this is not an entirely niche affair. Turkmenistan is aggressively positioning itself as a physical trading bridge between east and west, and north and south. The ease with which this or that item gets into the country has potentially far-reaching implications.

On paper, Turkmenistan’s tariff regime is a dream. Almost nothing but cars and certain consumables deemed unhealthy — namely, alcohol and tobacco — is subject to import duties. 

But as the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration notes, skating diplomatically over the the grislier details, “in practice the government levies customs duties and higher excise taxes on many imports.” The reality is that Turkmenistan’s border is at present strongly impermeable.

How does one even go about legally getting a banana into Turkmenistan anyway?

A trader’s first port of call is the State Commodity and Raw Materials Exchange, which is required to vet all import contracts. Commercial agreements must also get a once-over from a body called the Supreme Chamber of Control, which used to be run by President Serdar Berdymukhamedov.

Businesspeople with experience of doing import-export work in Turkmenistan warn that even if all the paperwork is in order, goods are liable to sit around in a customs control zone for at least a week. 

Long story short, unless informal emoluments are tactically distributed, the bananas will soon turn black in a warehouse somewhere.

Corruption and inefficient customs procedures are only one part of the story, though.

Ashgabat puts up multiple informal barriers to imports because it wants to give domestic producers a leg-up. 

Turkmenistan grows its own bananas, after all. 

Local agronomists have been toying with growing bananas, and even papayas, in greenhouses for the best part of a decade.

Back in 2019, Ferhar, a private farming enterprise based in the Mary province, said it had plans to “saturate the domestic consumer market” with its bananas. Company owner Batyrmurad Orazsahedov boasted at the time that he had managed to grow six-meter-high exotic fruit trees in greenhouses.

Little was heard of Ferhar after that, until earlier this year, when government-run newspaper Biznes Reklama ran a piece about how Turkmenistan is on the cusp of not only attaining self-sufficiency in its banana needs, but also becoming a leading supplier of the fruit to Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

Bananas are a small piece in a bigger picture. Future growth in the export of hothouse fruits — mainly tomatoes at the moment — is viewed as an important part of Turkmenistan’s economic diversification agenda. At the moment, the country relies almost entirely on selling natural gas to keep itself afloat.

But this is something of a race against the clock. 

In 2022, Turkmenistan started talks on accession to the World Trade Organization. If that initiative is to make any headway — and President Berdymukhamedov repeatedly insists this is a priority — it is only a matter of time before the hyper-protectionist regime under which Ferhar and its like are able to survive will have to be loosened. 

Turkmenistan also says it is eager to see progress on  efforts to develop transportation and bureaucratic regimes that will dramatically shorten delivery times for cargo travelling on trains and trucks through its territory between places like China, India, Iran, and Russia, not to speak of Western Europe.

This is being done to generate transit fees and prop up the fortunes of the Turkmenbashi sea port in the Caspian, which was refurbished at very considerable expense some years back.

But there are risks here.

Last year, India exported more than $170 million worth of bananas. Officials in Delhi say they want that number to reach $1 billion in the next five years. For almost any fruit or vegetable that Turkmenistan wants to sell — in either raw or processed form — there is a nearby country that wants to do the same. 

By opening up its economy, Ashgabat will expose fledgling export industries to the possibility of ruin.

That prospect could chill Turkmenistan’s enthusiasm for trading freely with the wider world. And that, in turn, might spell bad news for the smoothing of regional trade routes.