Resolution 417 of 30 July 2026, on developing local sugar production, food security and stabilising the sugar market, is marked for official use only. It sets annual quotas for the import of white sugar by food-industry enterprises at 300,000 tonnes: 100,000 tonnes for beverage makers, 100,000 for confectioners and 100,000 for producers of other food products. The quotas can be revised every six months on the basis of consumption, capacity utilisation, imports and domestic prices, and each November the government is to set the quota for the following year.
By 1 December 2026 an electronic platform is to distribute the quotas among importers through online auctions, integrated with the customs committee’s single window, with results published. The resolution does not say how supplies above 300,000 tonnes will be handled, whether other importers face limits, or whether a special tariff regime applies, Gazeta.uz writes.
Imports of sugar and raw sugar ran at 652,800 tonnes in the first nine months of this year, 36 percent more than a year earlier, worth $440.1 million, by customs data Gazeta.uz obtained.
The rest of the document is about the two sugar plants, Angren Shakar in Tashkent region and Xorazm Shakar in Khorezm. State organisations are to buy white sugar from local producers first, all local output is to be sold through the commodity exchange, and the state reserve is to be stocked from local product.
The plants’ loans from Uzpromstroybank can be extended to five years with a grace period of up to two, and half of the interest on their foreign-currency loans is to be compensated from August 2026 to August 2031. A law is to be drafted exempting the plants from profit and property tax until 1 January 2031. In return the lending banks get seats at the plants’ shareholder meetings and a right to block decisions, the plants are to appoint finance directors from those banks, pay no dividends until the loans are repaid, and attract $50 million of private investment by the end of 2026.
Imports of sugar and raw sugar ran at 652,800 tonnes in the first nine months of this year, 36 percent more than a year earlier, worth $440.1 million, by customs data Gazeta.uz obtained. In 2025 the full year brought 732,300 tonnes. The customs figures include raw sugar for the plants to process, so they are wider than the white sugar for industrial users that the quota covers.
Russia alone supplied 417,000 tonnes in 2025, 170,000 more than the year before, Russia’s agricultural export promotion centre Agroexport reported, naming the abolition of Uzbekistan’s 20 percent excise on white sugar imports from 1 October 2025 as one reason. The 20 percent customs duty remains.
Output at the two plants has fallen. In the first half of 2025 they produced 165,500 tonnes against 227,800 a year earlier and 332,600 in the first half of 2023, by the statistics committee’s data, while their design capacity is above 900,000 tonnes a year and the agriculture ministry put annual demand at 650,000 to 700,000 tonnes in 2024.
The economist Otabek Bakirov has criticised the quota. Uzbekistan may import 750,000 to 800,000 tonnes in 2026, he estimates, and a quota of 300,000 tonnes for industrial users risks higher prices, higher costs for beverage and confectionery makers and lower output and exports, and a return to state-allocated import quotas, auctions or not, carries corruption risks in his view because access to supply will depend on official decisions, with a concentrated market at the end of that road. In January, before the resolution, the head of the beverage association UzBev, Alfiya Musina, had described the price of sugar as a pain for every local producer.