Assessment of the

infrastructure; however, pre-cooling is not mentioned in the current ALC plan and is not 
currently practiced by most farmers or exporters.
Pre-cooling of fruits and vegetables is the critical first step in the cold chain, the lack of which severely 
impacts shelf life and quality especially for high value products such as cherries. Products entering the cold 
chain that are not pre-cooled have a high amount of field heat. Cold storage and refrigerated transport 
trucks (reefers) are designed the maintain temperature. Loading hot produce into storage or trucks not 
only misses the opportunity to cool the product as quickly as possible, increasing shelf life and quality by 
as much as two weeks, but it also taxes the refrigeration equipment.
• In addition to infrastructure, the success of the ALCs will depend upon the development 
of skills and support providing through a national Agricultural Extension Service, which is 
currently lacking.
During facility visits, the WFLO team recognized that operators were asking questions or doing things 
that could easily be addressed by agriculture extension agents if made available to them. For example, lack 
of good agricultural practices including hygienic practices both at the farm and cold storage facilities, 
storage handling practices, manufacturing processes, documentation and record maintenance, and 
calibration of measuring devices were major observed challenges which require immediate attention and 
technical support.
Based on information to date, the key recommendations are: 
1) Reconsider ALCs as a one-stop shop for produce handling and distribution. 

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3 | ASSESSMENT OF REGIONAL AGRI-LOGISTICS CENTERS IN UZBEKISTAN USAID.GOV 
Currently, the ALC concept is being considered as a ‘one-stop shop’ for all logistics and handling for 
export-oriented horticulture. However, this is not aligned with international best practice, where various 
integrated cold chain procedures are disaggregated. Therefore, it is recommended that the Government 
of Uzbekistan (GoU) consider the following: 
• Physically separate the individual links (post-harvest, transport, storage, processing) of the integrated 
cold chain, allowing multiple facilities related to each of these links to work as “clusters” where they 
will have the greatest impact in the various districts of the growing regions, and expand the 
infrastructure naturally as economic conditions allow.
• Remove the “dirty” post-harvest activities (e.g., rinsing/cleaning, grading, sorting, packaging, pre-cooling, 
etc.) activities from the ALC. This is recommended primarily for sanitation considerations. This 
separation of functions is standard operations in most developed markets.