November 19, 2021
Iranian trade with Europe has virtually ceased, according to the latest figures from the European Union. Europeans are only buying token amounts from Iran, with EU imports of Iranian products at only a few hundred million euros in 2019 and 2020, down where the figures were during 2012-14, when the EU joined the United States in sanctioning Iran. The EU isn’t sanctioning Iran now, but clearly few European firms want to buy Iranian products part of the reason likely is that Iran remains blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and so few European banks will deal with Iranian banks. Looking at the other side of trade, Iran isn’t buying much from the EU countries, either. In fact, Iranian imports in 2020 were the lowest of this century. Iran always bought more than 5 billion euros a year of European goods until 2019 and 2020. How much of that is a conscious effort by Iran to downgrade relations with Europe and how much is an unwillingness of European firms to sell to Iran is not known. The trend is continuing into this year; the latest EU figures show two-way trade was down another 3 percent in the first seven months of 2021.