Turkmenistan Summit for Landlocked Nations Under a Cloud of Doubt

Top international dignitaries, including UN Secretary-General António Guterres and leaders from 20 states, have converged on Turkmenistan’s Caspian resort of Avaza for the Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs). The high-stakes, decennial summit aims to reshape the global trade system for 32 developing nations economically hampered by their lack of direct access to maritime trade routes.

The conference, which began with a flag-raising ceremony, is set to adopt the “Avaza Program of Action for 2024–2034.” This new framework is intended to address the stark disadvantages faced by LLDCs, whose trade operations are, on average, 74% more expensive and whose cross-border logistics take twice as long as coastal nations. These countries collectively account for a mere 1.2% of global trade, leaving them at high risk of being sidelined by global economic progress.

However, the summit also serves as a stage for pressing geopolitical grievances. Belarus has announced its intention to use the UN platform to condemn what it calls restrictive measures by Baltic states that impede its right to sea access. A foreign ministry spokesperson highlighted that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are deliberately limiting Belarus’s trade and humanitarian contacts, specifically citing the ban on Belarusian potash fertilizer exports through the port of Klaipeda, despite Belarus owning a 30% stake in terminals there.

This blockade, Minsk argues, not only violates international law but also exacerbates global food security challenges by driving up fertilizer prices. Other participants, such as Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan, plan to focus on developing crucial transit and transport connections for their republic.

Yet, the event is shadowed by profound skepticism. Expert Derya Karayev, who has worked on UN projects in Central Asia, lambasted the conference as “another fruitless UN event” from an organization in “deep decline.” He criticized the UN bureaucracy for losing its sense of reality and promoting “false narratives” and abstract concepts like the Sustainable Development Goals, which he claims ignore rapidly shifting political realities and their associated risks.

According to Karayev, the UN’s high-minded concepts are nullified by pressing, on-the-ground crises that the organization fails to address. He pointed to the construction of Afghanistan’s Qosh Tepa canal and Tajikistan’s Rogun Dam, as well as the falling level of the Caspian Sea, as real-world challenges that make the UN’s initiatives an exercise in imitation and disinformation.

Karayev concluded by arguing that the UN offers an “ideological surrogate” that results in useless reports—a fact he says was admitted by the Secretary-General himself—while failing to develop effective security and development mechanisms. He dismissed the Avaza conference as an attempt by organizers to attach unrelated, pre-existing projects to the event’s agenda simply to create a hollow sense of significance, further underscoring the perceived irrelevance of such gatherings.