Head of Iran’s Flour Millers Association: We’ve Never Been This Dependent on Grain Imports

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, head of Iran’s Flour Millers Association, says Iran has never been this dependent on grain imports.

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi said on Monday, Ordibehesht 12, in an interview with the Entekhaab news site that this year “we must have 20 million tons of grain imports,” and predicted that the price of pasta per kilogram would also reach 32 to 36 thousand tomans.

The head of the flour millers association further noted the existence of a multi-year period of wheat self-sufficiency, adding that it appears this year we will witness imports of about 6 to 7 million tons of wheat to Iran.

Mortazavi implicitly rejected the impact of the Ukraine war on wheat price increases in this interview, saying that “in general, the global price of wheat has increased, but for several years the government was subsidizing industrial wheat. Now that the government has brought prices closer to global rates and corrected wheat purchases from farmers and cut subsidies, naturally the wheat price has become 12 thousand tomans.”

The guaranteed purchase price of wheat from domestic farmers last year was 9,500 tomans, while since Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Esfand 5, global wheat prices have grown about 60 percent and reached around $550 per ton, equivalent to about 15 thousand tomans per kilogram.

Following repeated increases in basic commodity prices in Iran during the current year, particularly the surge in food prices such as rice and potatoes, criticism of Ibrahim Raisi’s government has intensified. This comes as the head of the thirteenth government and his economic team have repeatedly promised to “change the current situation in favor of the people,” “reduce inflation to single digits,” and “eliminate absolute poverty.”

Source: Voice of America