DUSHANBE, September 20, 2014 Asia-Plus – Tajikistan’s Ministry of Industry and New Technologies (MoINT) and China’s Xinjiang Zhontai Sinsilu Noniye Invest (phonetically spelled) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on construction of a mineral fertilizer plant in Tajikistan.

The document was reportedly signed in Dushanbe on September 19.

An official source at a MoINT says the plant will have capacity of producing 300,000 tons of mineral fertilizers and 150,000 tons of phosphate fertilizers per year.

“The plant will work on gas produced from coal,” the source told Asia-Plus in an interview.

We will recall that Tajikistan’s only fertilize plant, TojikAzot, has not been in operation since 2008 due to lack of natural gas supplies.  Until 2008, when neighboring Uzbekistan upped the price of natural gas, a key input for the factory, TojikAzot served as a foreign investment-success story for Tajikistan’s economy.