Rising fuel costs have increased the price of boat trips across the Persian Gulf, while the slide in Iran’s currency has made it much costlier to pay suppliers.
“Nobody would believe that we put our life in danger on the sea for a profit of about $80” a month, Aghil Bandari, 40, told the Bloomberg news service in an interview at the fisherman’s pier in Bandar Abbas. With more sanctions, “our situation will only get tougher.”
Each year about $5 billion worth of goods are believed smuggled into Iran, the Mehr news agency reported in June 2011, citing Iran’s customs agency. About 80 percent of the cellphones sold in the country are brought in illegally, said Moham-mad Reza Farzanegan, an economics professor at the Center for Near and Middle East Studies at Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, who wrote a 2009 study on smuggling in Iran.
Smugglers who travel at night to the Omani port of Khasab say they have less cash to buy everything from cellphones, Nike shoes and fruit juices to perfumes, clothes, textiles, cigarettes and wrist watches.
Food has become a safer cargo than manufactured goods since Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi named the current Iranian year the “Year of Domestic Production and Support for Iranian Labor and Investment.”
Hossain Shirazi, 43, said when he was sent to court this year after a police patrol picked him up, the judge wasn’t as angry about the smuggling as about the textiles that he was carrying.
“The judge said, ’Are you looking to annihilate Iranian companies?’” Shirazi recalled. The judge specifically referred to Khamenehi’s directive on favoring local products over imported ones and fined him 15 million rials, he said. Six weeks later he was smuggling again.
In the short term, there’s little the government can do to stop smuggling, said Farzanegan of Philipps University. Local producers aren’t competitive because they have limited capacity and ageing technology, he said.
“The only way the government will protect local production is by increasing tariffs, which will be another signal to smugglers,” he said. “As long as there is a difference between the prices of imported goods and that of smuggled goods, smugglers will have an incentive.”
Penalties vary depending on what products are smuggled.
Those who are caught carrying alcohol can have their boat confiscated and receive a jail sentence, Ali Shabani, 32, said.
“Smuggling edible goods into Iran is easier than shoes or clothing because, if arrested by the police, the fine is smaller for these things,” he said.
Hamid, a 34-year-old street seller of sunglasses in downtown Tehran, says his wares mostly come from China via Bandar Abbas, where he buys from a friend. He says the police generally don’t crack down on him.
“It’s not like I’m selling opium or something,” he said. “When the police come and ask me to pack up, I leave and stash my stuff somewhere else. Sometimes they are tough and take the goods away.”
With energy subsidies being removed as part of a five-year plan that started in 2010, Shirazi said trips to Khasab have become more expensive.
Each fishing boat needs 250 liters (66 gallons) of gasoline for a return trip at a price of about $60, Shirazi said.
To cope with rising prices and the weakening currency, smugglers need to make more trips, crossing every other day rather than three or four times a month, Bandari says.
“The only reason I’m a fisherman is to get health insurance from the government for my family,” Shabani said. “Otherwise, it is not a worthy job to do.”