Those were probably sales from September that did not get entered into the customs computer until October. The statistics for November have not yet been published.
But the director of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization, Hamid Safdai, chose to ignore the little detail of the US import shutoff and instead tell reporters last week that Iranian sales in the American market were up by 50 percent so far this year.
As reported by the Mehr news agency, he said Iran’s sales to the United States in the first eight months of the current Persian year came to $224 million, compared to $152 million in the same period last year.
He ignored the fact that the surge was a result of importers, mainly carpet dealers, stocking up in anticipation of the end of imports.
The US government’s statistics show imports from Iran in the January-October 2010 period totaling $96.4 million, far below what Safdai cited. That was, however, up 45 percent from $66.6 million in imports during the same time period in 2009 because of the August-September stockup.
It was not clear how Safdai came up with figures on sales that were so much higher than the published American numbers. But, more importantly, Safdai chose to completely ignore the US cutoff of imports from Iran and to pretend that sales were booming.
