Uzbek Council Rejects Draft on Food Import Duties, Sends Back for Rework

Uzbekistan's presidential business council has returned a draft decree on import duties to its authors, citing insufficient economic justification for removing zero tariffs from nine food product groups. The decision came at the October 27 session of the Public Council for Entrepreneurship Support under the president, where the Ministry of Investment, Industry and Trade presented a plan to revise customs preferences on food and consumer goods.

Sarvarkhuja Khonkhuzhaev, head of the ministry's tariff and non-tariff regulation department, laid out the baseline: 56 product positions currently carry zero import duties, renewed annually since 2022, with the regime expiring on January 1, 2027. The ministry proposed extending full preferences to 45 positions until January 1, 2028, plus two more partially. Nine groups would lose the benefit entirely:

• condensed milk and cream;
• yoghurts;
• cheese and curd;
• apples, pears and quince;
• sugar confectionery;
• chocolate and cocoa products;
• pasta;
• mineral and carbonated water;
• soft drinks.

Khonkhuzhaev framed the change narrowly. "We are not excluding any positions from existing benefits and are not cancelling them early. We proceed from the fact that the benefit period ends, and we are considering which goods it can be extended for," he said. Local capacity drove the selection. From January to August 2026, 84 enterprises produced 84,000 tonnes of condensed milk and cream against imports of 15,000 tonnes; 77 plants made 50,200 tonnes of yoghurt, with imports of 9,800 tonnes of yoghurt and 10,300 tonnes of cheese and curd over eight months.

What does the tariff restoration change for prices?

Economist Otabek Bakirov opposed the exclusions, noting prices on some affected goods had outpaced headline inflation over the past nine months. Once preferences lapse, he said, import duties will reach 15% on cheese and curd and 20% on yoghurt, apples and pears. "If any product is excluded from the list, this must be justified economically and financially. I saw neither an economic nor a financial justification," Bakirov stated.

His argument went beyond numbers. "Until now, such products in our homes were kept under lock. They weren't eaten until guests arrived. The Uzbek people have only just begun living so they don't hide these products from children... Cheese has not yet appeared in every Uzbek household," he said. He also criticised the annual extension cycle: "Every year on December 29-30 everyone waits to see whether the benefits will be extended. This uncertainty sends wrong signals to producers, consumers and importers." The same draft extends industrial customs preferences, including for cotton-textile clusters, to 2030, while food tariffs get a one-year extension with a shortened list — an asymmetry Bakirov flagged. He proposed making zero rates permanent, or fixing them for at least three years.

Zafar Khashimov, founder of the Korzinka supermarket chain and chairman of the Trade and Services Association, backed the objections with retail arithmetic. Sufficient output or harvest does not equal sufficient supply, he argued: apples go into juice and jam, and part is lost in storage and transport. A 20% duty could raise final shelf prices by 25-26% in some cases, and not only on imports. "When duties are introduced, imported products are not the only thing that gets more expensive. If imported apples rise 20% in price, the local producer can also raise prices because competition weakens," Khashimov said. A survey he cited found ordinary families spend about 40% of incomes on food.

"If we make cheese and curd less accessible, people will eat more bread and drink tea with sugar. We need to think about dietary diversity," Khashimov warned, adding that price gaps with neighbours would spur unregulated cross-border imports, and that end-of-year tariff uncertainty feeds inflation expectations as suppliers hoard stock or pre-price in the risk. He proposed revising rates once every three years with six months' notice, and warned against basing a 2027 decision on eight months of statistics: consumption itself is growing, and a sufficient 84,000 tonnes today may fall short of next year's demand.

What happens next?

Other council members raised dairy-sector problems — livestock disease, shrinking pastures, rising costs, plant closures — and called for calculations covering job losses in trade and processing, tax revenue shifts, and informal border trade absent from customs data. The chair concluded the draft lacked adequate analysis and ordered it returned for rework, fresh calculations and consultation with business. All remarks will go into the session protocol for the relevant ministries. The exclusion of nine product groups therefore remains a draft; no final decision on the 2027 zero-tariff list has been taken.

The zero-duty regime began with decree UP-145 in May 2022, signed by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev as an anti-inflation measure; decree UP-41 of March 2023 expanded the list to dairy, cheese, chocolate and fruit. The latest extension, decree UP-269 of December 30, 2025, runs to January 1, 2027 and instructed the government to propose list changes based on food security and price stability — the mandate under which the current draft was prepared.