1/17/2025
I ran has set a target to expand its overseas farming to 2 million hectares (more than the size of New Jersey) by 2028 in order to ensure sufficient food supplies amid fears that unfriendly countries might cut off food supplies. This is a huge volume of foreign land that Iran plans to rent and farm.
Two million hectares is 7,800 square miles, which is larger than the land area of five US states Rhode Island, 1,024 square miles; Delaware, 1,949 square miles; Connecticut 4,842 square miles; Hawaii 6,420 square miles; and New Jersey 7,354 square miles. Reza Fotouhi, who leads overseas farming projects at the Agriculture Ministry, said expanding farming activity in other countries helps Iran reduce its reliance on food imports.
Fotouhi said Iran is also required to rely on overseas farming for 10 million metric tons of food imports by 2031 based on the terms of a document outlining Iran’s food security efforts. He said that the country is currently using some 228,000 hectares of land for farming in other coun tries.
So, the plan calls for expanding this almost nine times. The official added that lands used for corn in Brazil by Iranian companies had reached 50,000 hectares, adding that the country is also engaged in overseas farming of barley, oil seeds and soybeans in Kazakhstan and also in smaller projects in Belarus and Russia. He said private Iranian companies have also launched overseas farming projects in Ghana, Armenia and Pakistan.
The concern driving this plan is a fear among revolutionaries that the Islamic Republic’s enemies will at some point refuse to sell Iran food in order to force it to submit. Analysts say this is an irrational fear because there are so many countries exporting foodstuffs; even if the US tried to organize a food boycott of Iran, enough countries would refuse so that Iran would have no trouble importing sufficient food.
But beyond that, the US has long opposed food boycotts as immoral. What’s more, if the US did manage to block food supplies to Iran from foreign countries, that would include a ban on food supplies to Iran from land Iran rented or owned abroad.
