For many years, the destructive policies of the Iranian government have shrunk the people’s food basket, but recently the situation has become such that several government-linked economists and experts describe the situation as “worse than in war-torn Syria.”
The astronomical prices of goods have cut off the breath of the people, every day they are facing with an increase of the prices of some basic and non-basic goods, from the price of bread, chicken, fish, eggs, rice, and butter to the price of car tires and other items and living costs.
From time to time, big shocks such as the high price of gasoline and the price of currency and gold shake and affect their lives.
Statistics from the Statistics Center of Iran show that the inflation rate in July and August 2020 has increased significantly.
It is not a question of whether or not there is a shortage of any goods that are pointed out, but of the destructive policies of the Iranian government, which is the main cause of these increases.
One day we are talking about an increase in the price of eggs, and when the curtains are lifted a little, it becomes clear that the government is exporting it indiscriminately to other countries, and this increase in exports leads to a decrease in domestic supply, which means an increase in its price. Eggs in each comb increase from 20,000 to 38,000 tomans, which means that the price rises by 90%.
The cost situation of fish and shrimp is worse than that of eggs, according to Mehdi Yousefkhani, the head of the union of bird and fish sellers, the price of fish has increased about 2.5 times compared to last year, and the southern Narrow-barred Spanish mackerel fish has reached 170,000 tomans from 70,000 tomans per kilogram. In the case of chicken, which is one of the main ingredients of the people’s table, the destructive policies of the government are the cause of the people’s miserable situation and the high price of chicken.
Hassan Mehrabi Yeganeh, a professor of animal husbandry at the University of Tehran, said on state TV on 12 September: “Look, in the last six months, only the production of chickens in the country has lost more than 1 trillion Tomans due to inappropriate decisions of the Deputy Minister of Livestock Affairs. The year of the leap of production must be called the year of the catastrophic production by those people (the officials).”
In recent days, news about the rise of butter price has been another newsworthy topic about the shrinking of the people’s product basket.
Recently, butter has been quoted and its price is nearly doubled. From the beginning of 2019 to the beginning of this year, 55,000 tons of butter had been imported with an allocation of the official currency of 4,200 Tomans, which is only met the consumption needs of the citizens until the end of September, and after that, no butter has been imported and then it seems that the allocation of the official 4200 tomans currency for this product has been canceled.
State-run daily Vatan Emrooz wrote: “No one even thought that economic crises would reach butter. An event that shows the inefficiency and weakness of the policymaker.”
Of course, the skyrocketing prices resulting from the policies of the regime are not limited to food items, the same is true about other goods and commodities. For example, the dramatic increase in the price of heavy and light vehicle tires.
Iran’s Automobile Industry; Another Victim of the Ayatollahs
The regime refused to supply tires to shopkeepers after registering the sale of tires in the relevant system. In the meantime, the government removes the tire from the relevant system in which it was to be sold at the government price, and moved it to another system, in which it offers it now in the free market and at a free price. The result is the 50 percent increase in tire prices in the last month.
These systems with the help of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development extort 500,000 to 1.5 million tomans from the driver and one to two million tomans from the seller, in addition to the price of the tire, as well as the approved tire price.
The staggering price of the (foreign) currency, gold, housing, and cars, which imposes much more devastating costs on Iranian households, is beyond the scope of this article.
The miserable situation has reached the point where Kamran Nadri, an economist and former deputy director of the Monetary and Banking Research Institute of the Central Bank, says about the living conditions and shrinking of the people’s basket on September 14: “War-torn Syria does not have inflation like us. Iraq and Syria have faced the war, but they have not such inflation as Iran.”
He explicitly states that “despite the return of oil revenues to the country, we are facing it (inflation) due to fundamental economic problems such as poor management and the weakness of economic officials in the country.
“The whole world has been experiencing declining production since the coronavirus outbreak, but it has never experienced inflation. In general, it can be said that most of the country’s economic situation is related to domestic policies and government mismanagement.”
Of course, the word government should also be considered as the whole regime, mainly the regime’s supreme leader, because the government in this regime is more in the role of an external showcase of the regime, economic, political and executive power is in the hands of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and organs affiliated with him such as the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).
