Why have Iran’s neighbors returned its agricultural products?

  by Hossein Beizayi

Corruption and mismanagement in Iran seem to be an endless story, and as the days and weeks pass by, a new and different version of it finds its way to the media and the world wide web. This time, the refusal of several of Iran’s neighboring countries to accept Iran’s agricultural products due to mold and pesticide residues made multiple head-scratching headlines.

On Friday, December 10, Mostafa Daraeinejad, the head of Iran’s Fruit and Vegetable Association, told the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) that India, Russia, Uzbekistan, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, and a few other countries no longer accepted certificates issued by Iran’s agricultural organizations and demanded their standards to be met.

Iran’s produce exports by the numbers

According to government figures, Iran exported about $6.5 billion in agricultural products last year. Iran is among the top ten producers of a few dozen fruits and vegetables, including saffron, apples, citrus fruit, watermelons, melons, pomegranates, dates, pistachios, and walnuts. Daraeinejad said India was refusing import permits for Iranian kiwis after finding it did not meet safety standards. Iran is seventh in world kiwi production and produced nearly 60,000 metric tons, worth $95 million in 2018.

In November 2021, Qatari importers returned nearly 588 date palms, worth $136,000, imported for lining streets in preparation for the 2022 soccer World Cup.

Lack of transparency and lies

Nearly three weeks after the announcement of the return of agricultural products, state media repeatedly denied the real reason behind the return, which is the distribution of non-standard pesticides to farmers. The regime’s cover-up machines were busy at work playing innocence and downgrading the issue.

“The return of agricultural products by some countries is a simple misunderstanding,” the state-run Jahan-e-Sanat newspaper quoted a member of the parliament’s agriculture commission as saying. Another state-run newspaper denied the problem and called it “atmosphere-building.” The cover-up went even further and the Mashregh News website claimed that “the Israeli lobby” in Russia was behind the initiative to eliminate market competition for Israeli peppers. Russia was one of the countries that returned Iran’s bell peppers.

The real story

However, the cat was out of the bag, and several members of the regime’s members of parliament and media outlets revealed the true reason. On December 29, MP Alireza Pakfetrat said: “My other warning is to the Ministry of Jihad for Agriculture and the Ministry of Health. Why should we hear from neighboring countries that our food products are substandard? Why should our neighboring countries return our agricultural products because they are non-standard? Why should the toxins we produce in Iran not have the required standard? Mr. Minister of Agriculture, why did you not educate farmers to not use too many pesticides and chemical fertilizers? Why do you tarnish Iran’s reputation?”

MP Mohsen Alizadeh offered another perspective and said: “We have learned in the past few days that some of our products that were exported to neighboring countries have been returned. In this regard, we were informed that, unfortunately, there is a large mafia in the country that works only to import toxins and does not care about the health of the society.”

A few days earlier, the state-run newspaper Setareh reported on the poison and fertilizer mafia, which imports raw materials by monopolizing imports and using government subsidies. The newspaper inadvertently referred to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and agricultural monopolies affiliated with the Astan-e-Quds subordinate under the command of the Supreme Leader. The paper named 70 pesticide manufacturing plants in Iran, of which only 20 are active. Their maximum capacity could reach 250,000 tons of pesticides; however, they have only been producing 30,000 to 35,000 tons, way below their actual capacity, so the import of cheap and non-standard pesticides by the regime’s authorities would not be disturbed.

Poisonous produce distributed and sold to people

The saddest part of the story is that all these rejected and poisonous fruits and vegetables are sold to the people of Iran at a discounted price or distributed to impoverished Iranians.

The government claimed that the distributed poisonous peppers were not returned because of mold and pesticides but because Russia did not need the whole load. The regime’s authorities are well aware that these products are carcinogenic due to their high toxicity.

This is the true nature of the regime in Tehran. In its vocabulary, human life and human dignity are nowhere to be seen. The goal of this regime is maximum profit at any cost.

This article was first published by irannewswire