Iran has to import wheat and US sanctions threaten it

Minister of Agriculture Mahmoud Hojjati says Iran has to import some shipments of wheat this year because state purchases from local farmers at guaranteed prices are not enough.

“Although wheat production increased this year, we were not able to buy enough wheat at guaranteed prices,” the minister said Tuesday, Press TV reported.

Many local wheat growers were unhappy with buying prices offered by the government this year, opting to sell their crop to intermediaries instead.

“Last year, despite the severe drought, we were able to buy about a million tonnes of wheat more than the year before, but this year in some provinces farmers did not even sell us equivalent of their irrigated crop,” Hojjati said.

Much of Iran’s wheat cultivation depends on non-irrigated farming as the country is expanding dryland agriculture amid a lingering drought which is forcing it to use its water resources more economically.

Irrigated wheat covers only one-third of the total wheat area, thus the bulk of the crop depends on seasonal precipitation.

Most of the rain-fed wheat crop is concentrated in the northwest, but farmers in the region as well as in the country’s west sold very little new crop to the government this year, Hojjati said. 

At the start of the year, state officials were expecting wheat harvest to be enough to make it self-sufficient in the strategic crop for the fourth year in a row. They believed better rainfall across Iran would offset the loss of crops from unprecedented flash flooding in some provinces in March.

However, the government’s price tag of 2.2 million rials (nearly $18) per 100 kg was not enough to whet the appetite of many wheat growers to sell their produce to the state.  

Wheat production in Iran has experienced a cycle of boom and bust. Largely self-sufficient in wheat a decade ago, the country turned into one of the world’s biggest importers for many years due to a combination of population growth, receding farmlands and back-to-back drought years.

Most of the aquifers which carried water from under mountains into plains for hundreds of years have hit rock bottom, leaving vast expanses of farmland and orchards bone dry.

The country is now embracing new cropping methods and improving irrigation and seed technology to perpetuate its self-sufficiency in wheat which is a strategic commodity.  

SS