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Anna Bjerde, World Bank Regional Vice President for Europe and Central Asia region, visited Uzbekistan from March 8 to March 11, 2023, as part of a broader visit to Central Asia.
In Uzbekistan’s case, the new “cluster” firms have taken over the state’s longtime monopoly on the most profitable aspects of agriculture. Uzbek state banks have disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars to the private firms from loans received through the World Bank’s Horticulture Development Project since January 2018, when Tashkent launched its cluster reforms. Uzbek authorities also marked out exclusive territorial control for each of the new private agribusinesses without any public bidding process. The World Bank says the funds it has provided were meant to help create “bett...