Tehran ad Islamabd have agreed to increase transportation between the two countries in a bid to boost bilateral trade.
The two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) after two days of intensive talks in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Wednesday, Iran’s Road Maintenance and Transport Organization (RMTO) website reports.
“Both parties highlighted their deep relations as well as the trade volume and exchanged the data on mutual transport,” said Reza Nafisi, Managing Director of International Transport and Transit Office at the RMTO, who headed the Iranian delegation.
Currently, more than 60,000 lorries and 300,000 passengers have crossed the two countries frontiers, according to Nafisi. “The two sides expressed their satisfaction at their growing cooperation in international road transit,” added the Iranian official.
Tehran and Islamabad seek to augment their bilateral trade to 5 billion dollars. It now stands at one billion. Road transit is very important for the two neighbours. The MoU asks the two sides to follow up on the previous agreements that were made during the ninth meeting of Joint Iran-Pakistan Working Group held in the Pakistani capital in 2016.
The document was signed after new Pakistani Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, paid a visit to Iran and met with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif on 25 December.
Iran and Pakistán share a nearly 1,000-kilometer-long border. The MoU asks Islamabad to further improve the security on its routes and urges Tehran to ease the transport of Pakistanis tourists.
Managing Director of International Transport and Transit Office at Iran’s Road Maintenance and Transport Organisation hailed new installations built in the Pakistani city of Taftan, that lies some five kilometers from the Iran border. He also urged the two countries fast-track implementation of TIR and CMR conventions.
TIR -which stands for Transports Internationaux Routiers (International Transport Routes, in English)- is a multilateral treaty that was signed in Geneva on 14 November 1975 to simplify and harmonize the administrative formalities of international road transport.
CMR (Convention on the Contract for the International Carriage of Goods by Road) is a UN convention, singed in 1956, related to various legal issues concerning transportation of cargo by road.
Iran, Pakistan and the International Road Transport Union (IRU) signed an MoU in Geneva in May 2017 that established a cooperation to fully implement the rule and regulations on road transport between the two neighbouring countries.
Memorandum of Understanding signed between Pakistan, Iran and IRU last year in Geneva (Photo: IRU website)
Pakistan says nearly all TIR protocols have been put in place and are expected to be functional by April 2019, according to Asghar Altaf, Joint Secretary at the country’s Ministry of Communications, who headed the Pakistani delegation.
He said the first incoming transport into Pakistan under the TIR convention was carried out from Zahedan, the provincial capital of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan to the Pakistani city of Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan last July.
Iran can link Pakistan to the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS). “Pakistani tradesmen are interested in cooperation with the Iranian partners,” said the Pakistani official.
Also, the first outgoing transport from Pakistán under the same international convention took place from the port city of Karachi to the Afghan capital Kabul in October.
International transit between Iran and Pakistan paves the way for China’s road connection to Europe through China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as well as Istanbul-Tehran-Istanbul (ITI) routes. The mega infrastructure project is part of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) 2025 vision to link East Asia to West Asia and finally Europe.
ECO was founded by Iran, Turkey and Pakistán in 1984 in a bid to give an impulse to their regional cooperation. Its headquarters are in Tehran.