Administrative and non-tariff barriers impede trade on the silk road. This was the conclusion during the 3rd International Silk Road Businessmen Summit held in Trabzon, Turkey under the coordination of the Ministry of Economy of Turkey. 21 countries were represented in the forum. BCCI's President Tsvetan Simeonov also attended the forum at the invitation of Trabzon Chamber of Commerce, the Association of Exporters from the Black Sea region and the Embassy of Turkey to Bulgaria. He joined the "Logistics" discussion panel.
The "Logistics" panel presented some results from an experimental tour of a convoy of trucks of the Central Asian republics showing that about 35% of their time was lost in downtime and that nearly the same (34.8%) cost of transport was spent on official checkings and passing through customs procedures. Existence of corruption was mentioned as well.
Some data were presented to the forum stating that 80% of the goods being transported to Bulgaria were carried by Bulgarian transport companies which is probably due to the better correlation between price and quality.
According to the participants of the forum, Turkey's efforts to raise these issues to discussion deserve the serious considerations also by other governments on the "silk road".
Tsvetan Simeonov informed about some interesting initiatives of the BCCI, such as the Guide on border crossing. He presented the benefits of using standard GS1 logistics labels in transport and logistics, whereas some of the information is encoded with a barcode, which facilitates traceability of goods and consignments. By the use of new technologies, information on goods comes in parallel with their physical flow, thus reducing the influence of the subjective factor and limiting the cases of corrupt practices.