Iran pays off $3bn debt to domestic wheat farmers

The Iranian government has paid off its debts to domestic farmers for this year’s wheat purchases amid a bumper crop that has made the country self-sufficient in the grain.

Iran’s Organization of Directed Subsidies said on Sunday that it had settled a final tranche of debt to wheat farmers worth 5 trillion rials ($7.24 million) earlier in the day.

It said that total funds spent on purchasing wheat from Iranian famers had exceeded 2,110 trillion rials this year.

The figure is equal to $3.05 billion considering the free market price of hard currency in Iran and around $4.22 billion based on prices in a government-controlled market where the US dollar has been selling for 500,000 rials in the past weeks.

The government said total wheat purchases from Iranian farmers in the April-September harvesting season had reached just more than 11.993 million metric tons (mt), an increase of 16% compared to the same period last year.

It said the southwestern province of Khuzestan was the largest wheat producer in Iran this year with over 1.623 million mt of output purchased from nearly 81,000 famers.

Iran’s minister of agriculture said last week that this year’s bumper wheat crop had made the country self-sufficient in the grain.

Gholamreza Nouri’s announcement suggested that Iran will stop taking deliveries of sizable shipments of wheat from countries like Russia as it has been the case in the past few years.

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