{"book":"adl0957","page":113,"text":"82\n\nAfghanistan's Foreign Trade\n\nAlthough Afghanistan was once an important corridor for commercial traffic between the Occident and the Orient, little trade passes through the country today. As a result, Afghanistan is unable to supplement its export income through bank commissions, transportation charges, or middlemen profits. In addition, imports are subject to long delays, expensive transportation costs, and handling charges. Foreign trade, never-the-less plays an important part in the economic life of Afghanistan, and has been a major factor in the country's economic development.\n\nAfghanistan at present has no outlet to the sea; her foreign trade, therefore, passes through the neighbouring countries.\n\nThe tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan especially during 1953 to 1957 greatly affected the volume of Afghan trade through Pakistan. Due to this, a large amount of Afghan trade passed through the Soviet Union.\n\nAfghanistan is almost completely a supplier of raw materials and a market for consumer and developmental goods. Its most important export commodities are hides and skins, principally Karakuli skins; the figure reaching 2,000,000 skins a year. Next to skins and fur, the chief exports of the country are: fruits (fresh, dried and preserved), and nuts (almonds, pistachios, pignolia, etc.). Of late, cotton has occupied a prominent part in Afghan exports. It has been reported that annual exports during 1954 of Karakuli skins averaged approximately one and a half million pieces; ginned cotton about 9,000 tons; raw wool about 5,500 tons, and fruits and nuts about 80,000 tons. It has been estimated that currently from one-half to three-quarters of all raw wool and cotton exports go to the Soviet Union; almost all of the fruits, nuts and vegetables, to India","chars":1792,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00113.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/113","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/113","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}