DEC. 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – After visiting Ashgabat for talks with Turkmen leader Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said he would buy 200,000 tonnes of wheat from Turkmenistan for the 2015-16 season. The deal would make Turkmenistan one of the main exporters of wheat to Afghanistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
DEC. 12 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan talked with Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov. The talks had been planned earlier in the year but their timing was important as Mr Erdogan is trying to build support for Turkey in its row with Russia.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
DEC. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – After a decade of talks, Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov and leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan and India officially started construction of the TAPI pipeline that, they hope, will pump gas from Central Asia to South Asia by end-2018.
The $10b project is ambitious and fraught with risk. For a start nearly half the 1,800km route crosses Afghanistan where security has worsened over the past couple of years. This week the Asian Development Bank cut funding for a Turkmenistan-Tajikistan rail project that also crossed north Afghanistan because of security concerns.
Still, at the official opening ceremony for the TAPI pipeline in Mary, Turkmenistan, Mr Berdymukhamedov was in an upbeat mood.
“TAPI is designed to become a new effective step towards the formation of the modern architecture of global energy security, a powerful driver of economic and social stability in the Asian region,” media quoted him as saying.
By December 2018, so the plan goes, Turkmenistan should start pumping 33b cubic metres of gas a year to India.
But, as Anupama Sen, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, explained for India, TAPI has always been more of a political, rather than gas supply, project. She said India is increasing coal production to meet power demand as it is cheaper than importing gas.
“India’s negotiations over TAPI have been driven by diplomacy,” she said.
India has been trying for years to bolster its influence in Central Asia where Russia and China are so dominant. It lost out in 2013 on a stake in the Kashagan oil field in the Kazakh sector of the Caspian Sea to China. TAPI now gives it a stake in Central Asia.
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(News report from Issue No. 261, published on Dec. 20 2015)
DEC. 8 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) -Turkmenistan’s President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov reprimanded the head of the Central Bank and the head of the Commodity Exchange Agency at a government meeting, the Trend news agency reported.
Although details of the dressing- down were thin, as expected from Turkmenistan, it does indicate that, perhaps, Mr Berdymukhamedov is feeling the economic strain.
There have been a number of reports coming out of Turkmenistan over the year that show the country’s economy is under pressure from a drop in energy prices, a recession in Russia and a fall in value of currencies across Emerging Markets. At the start of the year the Central Bank devalued the manat currency by 19%. Last month, dissident websites reported that currency controls had been imposed.
And now this.
Trend reported that Mr Berdymukhamedov had told Central Bank chief Merdan Annadurdiyev and the head of the commodities exchange, Amandurdi Ishanov, that their work had been substandard. The report didn’t give any specific examples.
Mr Berdymukhamedov is keen on giving ministers a public dressing down. These reprimands generally betray some of his thinking on the country’s development. By focusing on the Central Bank and the commodities exchange, Mr Berdymukhamedov is showing his frustration with the economy.
With the distinct lack of accurate economic data flowing out of Turkmenistan, this is important.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – State workers in Turkmenistan have been told they are not allowed to buy foreign currencies, the dissident website chrono-tm.org reported. The website, which is based in Europe but has good sources in Turkmenistan, said that the country is running out of US dollars. Its reports have been proved accurate previously although this report could not be independently verified.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko flew into Ashgabat for talks with Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berymukhamedov on how to develop bilateral relations next year. Belarusian companies are involved in mining and fertiliser production in Turkmenistan. Mr Lukashenko was returning from Vietnam.
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(News report from Issue No. 260, published on Dec. 11 2015)
DEC. 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – If Turkmenistan wants to realise its potential and become one of the world’s top energy exporters it should improve its foreign investment climate, Reuters quoted Daniel Rosenblum, deputy assistant secretary for Central Asia at the U.S. Department of State, as saying on a trip to Ashgabat.
Western companies have found it difficult to enter the Turkmen energy sector despite an apparent abundance of hydrocarbon wealth. It is estimated that Turkmenistan holds the world’s four largest gas reserves.
Turkmenistan only offers Western companies service contracts on its various gas projects and not the production sharing agreements that many want. And this, Mr Rosenblum said, would hold back Turkmenistan’s development as a gas exporter.
“A critical element of success is to create the right mix of incentives,” he said according to the Reuters report.
Most of Turkmenistan’s gas flows to China through a network of pipelines that cross Central Asia but Turkmen officials have said they want to widen the client base. This includes pumping gas to Europe and India.
Turkmenistan will officially begin work on the TAPI pipeline that will, it hopes, eventually pump gas directly to consumers in India. Its an ambitious project and one that Western companies had previously expressed interest in.
The lack of a production sharing agreement, though, coupled with a poor record for corruption and the sheer ambition of building a 1,700km pipeline across unstable Afghanistan, with all its security concerns, has deterred potential suitors.
In a thinly veiled criticism of Turkmenistan, Mr Rosenblum told a conference: “Land-locked countries with potentially large resources, such as Turkmenistan, need to move expeditiously to capture market opportunities since their competitors are not idle.”
Although he wasn’t specific, Mr Rosenblum appeared to be saying that Western companies with their expertise and know-how would be able to help Turkmenistan speed up development of its hydro-carbon sector.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)
NOV. 30 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Officials in Turkmenistan organised 4,166 people to sing a song written by Turkmen president Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, AP news agency reported, breaking a previous world record for the largest choir. The choir sung in a giant yurt.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)
DEC. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) –Turkey’s low-cost airline Pegasus will open a new Istanbul-Turkmenbashi route, according to Turkmenistan’s official press service. Pegasus would become the first international airline to fly to Turkmenbashi, a port city on the Caspian Sea. The nearby Awaza resort should benefit from this new route.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)
DEC. 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Turkmen military has been fortifying the country’s southern border with Afghanistan, the official government website said. Turkmenistan is increasingly worried about the move north of the Taliban.
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(News report from Issue No. 259, published on Dec. 4 2015)