2023-12-28 19:00:08
Land, rather than sea. While incidents are increasing along major maritime routes, such as at the entrance to the Red Sea, where several ships were attacked in mid-December by Houthi rebels, a new land corridor linking Asia to the Europe could serve as an alternative in the event of a crisis, in an increasingly uncertain geopolitical context. And all the more so since he avoids Iran and Russia.
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This “middle corridor” which crosses many countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, including Kazakhstan, Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, has already been used by carriers who wanted to avoid the Russia on the rail “Silk Road” linking China to Europe, following the invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022. Container traffic there increased by 33% in 2022 compared to previous year, before falling by 37% over the first eight months of 2023 due to congestion. Hence the need to build infrastructure there.
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Traffic could increase from 20,000 containers per year to 130,000 by 2040, according to forecasts published in June 2023 by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), or even to 865,000, if investments of at least less 18.5 billion dollars (16.6 billion euros), manage to shorten the transport time between Europe and China to thirteen days. “The emergence of this new route is symptomatic of the ongoing recomposition of globalization, and not of its deceleration,” underlines Julien Marcilly, chief economist of the consulting company Global Sovereign Advisory.
Brussels is also eyeing this route
This corridor, also called the “Trans-Caspian International Transport Route”, is taking shape. In November 2022, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Kazakhstan signed a ” roadmap “ which lists priority investments to improve regional connectivity. A few months later, in July 2023, these same countries, except Turkey, announced the creation of a logistics company, Middle Corridor Multimodal, to streamline the transport of goods and harmonize transit rates.
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Brussels is also eyeing this route, the only one that connects Europe to China without passing through Russia. The EBRD thus announced, in July 2022, 100 million euros of investment in the modernization of the Kazakh railway network, which will be used to “improve regional and international connectivity as well as trade security because, we can read in the press release published at the time of the announcement, the middle corridor offers one of the few realistic alternatives to rail freight transport between China and Europe”.
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