US customs agents found huge trucks jammed with carpets and individual cars with one carpet rolled up in the trunk.
That all ended when the US allowed Iranian carpet imports back into the United States in 1999.
But the US banned Persian rug imports once again in September 2010. And what do you think has happened with Canadian imports of Iranian carpets since then?
Wrong!
This time it is very different. Canada’s imports of Persian carpets in 2011 were actually down from 2010. In fact, the 2011 imports were the second lowest of the decade.
It isn’t known if the Americans took the Canadian government out to the woodshed for a little talk about rugs. Perhaps Canadian interest in Persian carpets is just flagging as Iranian rug imports have generally gone down all through the last decade. But the one thing that is certain is that Canadian carpet shops are not fronting for American carpet dealers this time.
Here are the statistics from Canadian customs for carpet imports from Iran each year of the last decade in Canadian dollars:
2002 18,830,000
2003 16,656,000
2004 9,820,000
2005 9,729,000
2006 10,247,000
2007 8,094,000
2008 6,420,000
2009 5,217,000
2010 6,217,000
2011 5,535,000
Iran announced that in the last Persian year it exported $560 million worth of carpets, so less than 1 percent went to North America.
According to official US data, the United States imported $914,000 worth of Iranian products last year—though how that much was imported is unclear. The imports included $45,000 worth of magazines, books and printed material, which is not banned, plus $16,000 worth of non-citrus fruits, $16,000 worth of carpets, and $827,000 worth of used or second-hand merchandise, all of which are banned.
It is possible the extremely small and insignificant purchases—a drop in the bucket of US imports that exceeded a trillion dollars last year—were not actually imported from Iran but from Iraq or somewhere else and miscoded. That was what happened when investigators looked into the printed reports from some earlier years showing rifles and aircraft being exported to Iran. Instead of typing IRE for Ireland or IRQ for Iraq, the customs agents had input IRI.
The Islamic Republic bought much more from the United States last year. Iranian imports of American goods totaled $229.5 million in 2011. Of that, 52 percent was for agriculture products and 33 percent were medical products, which are exempt from sanctions. But 13 percent was for “plastic materials and resins,” which are not exempt. And the remaining 2 percent were all over the board and all appeared not to be permitted, such as $4,000 worth of “industrial valves”—perhaps another coding problem.