Ｘｉｎｊｉａｎｇ’ｓ　Ｂｏｒｄｅｒ　Ｔｒａｄｅ　Ｗｅａｔｈｅｒｉｎｇ　Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｉｃ　Ｃｒｉｓｉｓ.docVIP

Ｘｉｎｊｉａｎｇ’ｓ　Ｂｏｒｄｅｒ　Ｔｒａｄｅ　Ｗｅａｔｈｅｒｉｎｇ　Ｅｃｏｎｏｍｉｃ　Ｃｒｉｓｉｓ 　　YANG Ruiqing, head of the Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Bureau of Altay, Xinjiang, got a call from Kazakhstan on the first of June this year. “Our vegetable supplies are low, pushing the prices sky high. Would you mind giving a produce fair by the end of the month to cool down the market a bit?” At the other end of the line was Chief of the Foreign Trade Administration for East Kazakhstan State. Before the local harvest season, vegetables there are always several times more expensive than those in neighboring Xinjiang. Yang routinely receives calls for help from his Kazakhstani counterpart at this time of the year. 　　 　　 　　Produce Trade Flourishing 　　 　　Altay in northern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region borders Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia, and seats the largest number of land ports in China. In the Republic of Kazakhstan on the other side of the border, the mainstay of the economy is animal husbandry; locally grown vegetables are of limited varieties and volumes, and far from meeting local demand. In spring and winter, vegetable prices in Kazakhstan and its Central Asian neighbors ?C Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan ?C soar to ten times those in Xinjiang. 　　At the last produce fair in Kazakhstan one month before, Yang Ruiqing had barely set his Chinese booth up when he noticed the stack of packaged strawberries his team brought was already gone. “They were snapped up in the blink of an eye,” he laughed. 　　According to Urumqi customs statistics, Xinjiang exported 23,000 tons of vegetables, worth US $9.35 million, in the first five months of this year, marking increases of 78.5 and 150 percent respectively over the same period last year. Food is one of the few sectors immune to economic sluggishness. The successive droughts in Central Asia in recent years have added to the spur in demand for Xinjiang vegetables as well. As a result, prices for vegetables exported from the auto