On November 26, 2021, HORASIS: the Global Visions Community held its annual Asia Meeting, co-hosted with the Confederation of Indian Industries and co-chaired by Murat Seitnepesov, Chairman of Caspian Week.
Central Asia has long been on the edge of global trade flows, despite its historic role as a land bridge between Asia and Europe. Its economic integration is held back by sparse settlement, infrastructure bottlenecks, ageing road and rail networks, long distances to major markets, and regulatory and policy barriers.
Find more on our key sessions: *[Enhancing Connectivity and Freight in Central Asia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpd0RAjajLQ)* and *[Mechanisms for Avoiding the Next Pandemic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpd0RAjajLQ)*. In our first session, Enhancing Connectivity and Freight in Central Asia, Murat Seitnepesov led a lively discussion on how Central Asia can break away from its reliance on exports of primary products, and on initiatives to improve connectivity that could help its economies prosper.
Martin Voetmann (Member of the Board, DP World, Kazakhstan) is a strong advocate of more transparency, efficiency and a bigger role for private operators, a view drawn from his long experience in the region. Central Asia remains one of the most difficult places in the world to do logistics, but the situation has been improving over the past 5–6 years thanks to huge government investment. The catalyst has been the Chinese "Belt and Road" initiative. The BRI has shown governments the value of proper logistics infrastructure in key passage areas, such as the China–Europe corridor. Aftaab Khatib (Vice President, Caspian Container Company, Switzerland) shared this view and also pointed to the role of the Eurasian Economic Union.
Cristiano Fibbi (Head of Strategy, Integral Group, Switzerland) also agreed that market trade dynamics drive the development of infrastructure. He called for more investment in IT connectivity, to allow greater trade demand and stimulate logistics investment.
The panel also acknowledged that connectivity depends not only on hard logistics but also on soft elements, such as harmonised and standardised border-crossing procedures, as Aftaab noted in his closing remarks. The focus often moved from the public sector to the private one. Martin was one of the most active on both fronts and concluded that the next step for logistics in the region is for private companies to open up the currently closed-circuit lines, so that containers can stay on the east-west route for the round trip. Private operators could then help increase transparency across the network and eventually create a centralised platform to track containers. That is not easy in the region, as containers are often dropped off in place after delivery. On this front, Aftaab gave another example of private involvement, proudly announcing that his company was the first to tackle the issue of abandoned containers in Central Asia. Container logistics stayed very much in focus to the end, when Cristiano presented the solution the Integral Group is working on to connect Central Asia to the rest of the world. The Group is working on a "webshop" that gives buyers worldwide access to commodities from the region, cutting out the middleman through direct container shipments.
Our second session, Mechanisms for Avoiding the Next Pandemic, asked a philosophical question: should we keep trying to prepare for and prevent the next pandemic, or just wait and decide what to do when it happens?
Virginie Coulloudon (Executive Director, Your Public Value, Germany) felt we were still fighting this pandemic before thinking about future ones. She pointed to an important gap between developed and less developed countries: the vaccination rate in less developed countries is only 2%, against 41% in developed countries. Corporations, she said, must change their mindset and treat society and the environment as active stakeholders.
Yan Liu (Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Biocaptivate, USA) insisted that the world was suffering under the illusion that science was progressing at an optimal rate. Science has its own internal problems: structural, management and philosophical ones. To change that, and to make sure the public and decision-makers are willing to fund science, we need new blood in science: the next generation of scientific leaders and communicators who are willing to challenge the existing narrative. Louis Metzger (Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Deep Views Inc, USA) pointed to the gap between what we should do and what human nature tends to do, which is to invest minimal resources and hope for the best. The pandemic helped us catch up remarkably quickly on surveillance of novel pathogens, but sustained investment is needed to solve some of the long-term problems in infectious diseases. He stressed that logistics has been very difficult both in developing vaccines and in distributing them. We need very clear interaction and good collaboration between academia, industry and governments, both national and supranational.
One of the projects presented by Mikhail Treyvish (President, OmniGrade Universal Crowdsourcing Agency, Russia) was "the city of the future". The idea is to find solutions to the problems urban residents will face in the future, and one of the most important is how to prevent or reduce the risk of future epidemics and pandemics. He firmly believed we need to prepare for the next pandemics in advance, but that we do not need to spend a lot of money on it. For instance, the spread of pandemics depends on people's behaviour. If educational courses on epidemiology were launched for schools, universities and urban residents, it would help improve behaviour and reduce the spread of pandemics. Another important point was to create more comfortable conditions for remote work, to reduce the concentration of people in public transport.
Kerri Cummings (Founder, Mindbar, Germany) looked at the psychology of pandemics. Mixed messages and misinformation spread on social media, and tackling that is a huge project that needs work right now, and in the future.
The panel also discussed the different stages of preparedness for the next pandemic, and which ones to focus on first. Some panellists said we must embrace this complexity and keep innovating in a specific field: predicting, detecting, preventing and dealing with the consequences. Companies need to change how they build their strategies, taking new stakeholders into account early on. Society should focus on building the capacity and infrastructure to scale up and rapidly develop therapeutics and vaccines. Others stressed that early detection matters, not just for viruses but also for other pathogens, such as drug-resistant bacteria. The good news is that next-generation DNA sequencing is getting better and cheaper. One helpful step would be to bring in citizen scientists to crowdsource the tracking of some of these pathogens. The panellists insisted we should not rely only on governments, but also on local authorities, large corporations, and small and medium-sized businesses, among others.
Murat Seitnepesov concluded that we need to allocate and spend resources now and try to prevent the next pandemic.