France will support Uzbekistan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), President Emmanuel Macron said as he visited the Central Asian nation on November 1.
Macron also said: “France stands for the early signing of an Agreement on Expanded Partnership and Cooperation between the European Union and Uzbekistan.”
The portfolio of active and promising investment projects of the two countries recently exceeded €10bn.
A €1bn strategic cooperation programme is being implemented jointly with the French Development Agency.
The countries are also discussing major new projects in the fields of green energy, the extraction and processing of raw materials, agriculture, water supply, logistics, infrastructure development and tourism.
In addition, there are plans to open an Uzbek-French university in Tashkent and a branch of the Alliance Francaise in Samarkand.
Bloomberg earlier described Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as “Putin’s backyard” and speculated that Macron would seek “new friends and uranium” in the region’s number one and two economies. Kazakhstan is the world’s largest uranium producer and Uzbekistan ranks in the top five.
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