Zulfiya, a farmer from the Bobojon Gafurov district of Sughd region, is eagerly waiting for the mobile lab team to visit and check the quality and safety of the apricots produced by the ‘Chorsu’ farm that she runs together with her family for the last 20 years. While waiting, bitter memories from five years ago come flooding back as she recalls how the whole batch of their produce shipped for export to Lithuania was rejected by the food lab at the border. It didn’t meet the EU technical regulation for food safety, as the analysis traced a high level of pesticides potentially damaging to human health. An unintended mistake cost Zulfiya and her family almost a year of labour and investment. 

Zulfiya is not alone in this struggle. In Tajikistan, there are around 180,000 small farms – individual or family farms - that produce fruits, vegetables, nuts, or honey. The small farms run by individual farmers are usually on plots not bigger than 1-2 hectares (1 hectare = 2.5 football fields), followed by the midsized category of farms, averaging about 20 hectares. The number of agronomists in the country, however, is far from enough to cater for the needs of the enormous number of small to medium producers and processors, even more so in the remote areas. Without the proper professional guidance, agrochemicals are often used in excess, and often not even for the right reasons. When the bad news arrives from buyers’ quality and safety control - or border control in the cases of export - it is already too late. The transportation costs fall on the producer, adding up on the loss of profit due to the rejected batch of products.

Better safe than sorry 

There is, however, a way to prevent this. In recent years, Tajikistan is seeing a proliferation of providers that advise and implement food quality and safety standards. One such is “Markazi Idorakunii Sifat”, a quality management centre which for the last 12 years offers advisory services to farmers and processing companies to introduce international quality standards and laboratory analyses and testing of food products for quality and safety.

The centre is based in Khujand, the second-largest city of Tajikistan and the capital of Tajikistan's northernmost Sughd province. However, what sets apart “Markazi Idorakunii Sifat” from other such centres is that a year ago they opened the first - and so far the only - mobile laboratory for agriproducts testing in Tajikistan. Their services are now available “upon call” to almost every corner of the country. UNDP, through the regional Aid for Trade in Central Asia project supported the opening of the mobile lab by securing the purchase of the express equipment and reagents for food safety and quality analysis in 2021.