Trade tops the agenda for SCO leaders on how to boost business, with one of the simplest ways being the improvement of roads.

On Friday, China and Russia signed a new agreement on international road transport to ease border restrictions and boost bilateral trade. In addition, a brand new route linking China’s port city of Dalian and Russia’s third largest city, Novosibirsk started a test run in May.

Umberto de Pretto, the Secretary-General of the International Road Transport Union (IRU) told CGTN that the new route is not just an infrastructure project.

With a goal of reaching 200 billion in trade between China and Russia by 2020, the secretary-general told CGTN that roads are the key. 

"You need routes. It’s nice to say the words but how you will actually affect the trade. By creating this new trade route, you create a vehicle to actually gets to that 200 billion per year," said de Pretto.

However, the secretary-general did point out that despite China having the most number of borders at 12, the development of road transport in the country has been slow, and maritime is the preferred method for trade. But road transport is much faster than ships – reaching the Europe within two weeks compared to up to four months by sea.

China is now part of the United Nations TIR Convention, designed by the IRU in July 2016. The TIR system is the world's only cross-border freight system.

Established 69 years ago, one year after the creation of IRU, the system was initially designed to help facilitate trade in war-torn Europe. Some of these problems are also seen today in Southeast Asia where trucks have to wait a long time before passing borders. The system allows goods to be only inspected at the origin, and only to be opened at the final destination.That means cargo trucks can go through all the various borders without stopping.

“In June, here in China the SCO meeting and of course one of the top items on the agenda will be how do we trade and how do we facilitate trade between our nations. How do we secure trade? This is very important. It is true to facilitate, but you also need to secure. The TIR system is very secure system and its been 69 years in existence we never had one security breach. And for the trade community, it is great because then instead of having hours and hours to weeks of waiting time, we expect we can reduce the waiting time of about 80 percent, we believe we can reduce costs from 30-40 percent,” said de Pretto.