President Shavkat Mirziyoyev chaired a government meeting focused on improving state management in food safety and supporting livestock production, the presidential press service reported.
Uzbekistan aims to increase its food exports to $10 billion and expand its export reach to an additional 100 countries by 2030. The meeting emphasized that achieving these goals requires a food safety system that fully complies with international standards.
"Consequently, a unified database was never established among the sanitation, veterinary, and plant quarantine authorities, and certain tasks and functions overlapped. This caused unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles for entrepreneurs during import and export processes," the meeting highlighted.
The Plant Quarantine Agency holds 100 tasks and functions, the Veterinary Development Committee has 115, and the sanitary-epidemiological surveillance system manages 44. Despite these extensive checklists, a comprehensive "farm-to-table" product tracking system has yet to be fully implemented.
Unresolved issues also persist in the export sector. Specifically, it was noted that the European Union issued 25 warnings due to pesticide residues found in Uzbek products. "This demands a radical overhaul of the product safety control system to boost our competitiveness in international markets," officials stated during the meeting.
Regulatory bodies have traditionally limited their oversight to checking final products. Meanwhile, the implementation of international standards that guarantee food safety at every stage of the production chain has been largely neglected.
In light of these challenges, a decision was made to carry out a sweeping reform of the food safety system and establish a single, centralized framework that meets international requirements.
A Food Safety Committee will be established to oversee all regulatory processes based on the "farm-to-table" principle. This new entity will be formed by merging the Plant Quarantine and Protection Agency, the Veterinary Development Committee, and the food safety division of the Committee for Sanitary and Epidemiological Welfare.
"The new system will abandon outdated inspections that hinder business activities. Mandatory food product certification will be scrapped and replaced with a control and inspection framework based entirely on risk assessment," officials announced at the meeting.
Currently, this risk-based approach is applied to only 1,600 out of 80,000 facilities nationwide—a mere 2%. Moving forward, a digital system will be launched to issue rapid alerts regarding hazardous products and facilitate their immediate recall from the market.
Starting January 1, 2029, fruit and vegetable exports will be routed exclusively through agrologistics centers. Additionally, a dedicated program will transition large-scale food industries with high export potential toward international risk analysis standards and Codex Alimentarius guidelines. The adoption rate is projected to reach 20% by 2028, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2032.
Public inspectors will be deployed across 20 districts specializing in fruit and vegetable production to help issue domestic phytosanitary certificates. Furthermore, fruit and vegetable export statistics will now be credited directly to the region where the produce was actually grown.
Starting in 2027, six state responsibilities—including laboratory testing, animal vaccination, disinfection, and identification—will be gradually privatized. Provincial governors have been directed to establish at least two private laboratories and veterinary clinics in these fields by the end of the year.
An online monitoring framework will be rolled out for every product type. Additionally, the "Agro Kumakchi" mobile app will introduce an electronic "Field Diary" feature for farmers and smallholders. Artificial intelligence will also be deployed to predict pest outbreaks and offer targeted recommendations to growers.
The government plans to launch a performance ranking system for proactive and compliant farmers, offering them extra incentives and benefits. By March 1, 2027, a unified automated information platform for food safety will go live. This platform will integrate directly with the border control "single window" system, liberating exporters from unnecessary bureaucratic red tape.
Thanks to this new infrastructure, customs clearance times will drop from nine days to just two for imports, and from three days to a single day for exports. As a result, businesses are projected to save 70 billion soums in warehousing and storage costs.
The newly formed Food Safety Committee will be headed by Azizbek Urunov, who will concurrently maintain his role as Uzbekistan's chief negotiator for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
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