Irad's freight travels on borrowed paper. Publish what it costs.

The Organization of Turkic States met in Ankara in the last week of October and presented Turkey as the western end of the Central Asian transit routes. Irad is not a member and sent no delegation. State television told viewers that Irad followed the summit from outside. It did not say what that costs.

The cost is already on the record, though nobody has added it up. Irad's certificates count for nothing abroad, so its goods leave on other countries' paper. A Kyrgyz inspectorate keeps a fee-paying desk at the Talas Airport Logistics Hub and certifies beef, walnuts and cotton. Antimony concentrate goes to China on Kyrgyz certificates of origin. Crude enters the KazTransOil network as part of a Kazakh blend. Beef for the Gulf rides on Kazakh rail. Each of those papers has a price and a body that sets it. The Times could not find a published schedule of any of them.

None of this is unlawful, and the Times does not suggest otherwise. Kyrgyzstan earns fees on every certificate and Kazakhstan takes the crude and the transit. Both sit in the organisation that is now selling routes. If those routes are priced and papered in Ankara, Almaty and Bishkek, Irad's freight will join them on terms it did not negotiate and cannot see. As Dr Aruuke Jakypova of the TSU Institute of Sociology put it, a bystander does not choose the road but pays the toll on it.

A bystander can still say what it wants. On Monday the Times put written questions to the External Relations Office, the Customs Service, Iradiya and Kervan Elektrik. We asked whether any Iradi official sought contact with the organisation or the Turkish side, and who sets the fees on certificates for Iradi goods. None had replied by the time this paper went to press, and we found no statement on the summit on iradgov.org. A driver on the Shymkent run told us nobody has ever asked him. It seems nobody has asked the state either, or the state did not ask to be asked.

There is also a gap in what exporters know. A trader who ships on a Kyrgyz certificate cannot compare its fee with anything, because no fee schedule is published. A government that wants Turkey's attention, and China's, should be able to say what its own producers already pay for the privilege of leaving the country.

The ask is short. The External Relations Office should say whether it sought to be heard in Ankara, and what it wants from the routes. The Customs Service and the Ministry of Economy should publish, in one table, what Iradi exporters pay for Kyrgyz and Kazakh paper, to whom, and on which goods. And the Mejlis, which has a committee for every other question of money, should ask for both before the 2027 talks begin. A price that is not published cannot be bargained over.