June 25, 2021
The deputy head of the Iran Customs Administration, Mehrdad-Jamal Arvanqi, says 200,000 tons of rice stored at Iranian ports is rotting for lack of hard currencies the likely result of US banking restrictions.
Arvanqi announced that the rice had been stored at the country’s docks for months because the importers couldn’t come up with the required foreign currencies to pay for it.
Rice is the second most important food, after bread, in the consumer basket of low-income households.
Speaking to the daily Hamshahri, a representative of the Rice Importers Association said the reason for the more than 100 percent increase in the price of foreign rice this Persian year was the decision by the government at Now Ruz to drop rice from the list of “essential” goods for which importers may buy foreign currency at the heavily subsidized price of 42,000 rials per dollar.
Importers must now buy their foreign currency on the NIMA exchange. NIMA is the Persian acronym for Consolidated System of Foreign Exchange Transactions. The price of a dollar on NIMA is now about 210,000 rials or five times the price under the old subsidized system.