Iran turns to barter for food as sanctions cripple imports

In a post I did here a couple of years ago, I made the offhand remark that while the Saudis may have us over a barrel, we have them over a loaf of bread, which takes more profound effect a lot faster. It would appear to be the case in Iran.

From Yahoo News:

PARIS/TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran is turning to barter – offering gold bullion in overseas vaults or tankerloads of oil – in return for food as new financial sanctions have hurt its ability to import basic staples for its 74 million people, commodities traders said Thursday.

Difficulty paying for urgent import needs has contributed to sharp rises in the prices of basic foodstuffs, causing hardship for Iranians with just weeks to go before an election seen as a referendum on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s economic policies.

New sanctions imposed by the United States and European Union to punish Iran for its nuclear program do not bar firms from selling Iran food but they make it difficult to carry out the international financial transactions needed to pay for it.

Reuters surveys of commodities traders around the globe show that since the start of the year, Iran has had trouble securing imports of basic staples like rice, cooking oil, animal feed and tea. Grain ships have been held at its ports, refusing to unload until payment can be received for cargo.

With Iran’s rial currency tumbling, the prices of rice, bread and meat in Iranian bazaars have doubled or more in dollar terms in recent months.

Iranian grain importers have in the past side-stepped sanctions by booking business through the United Arab Emirates, traders said, but this option was cut off by the UAE government in response to sanctions.

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About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

11 Replies to “Iran turns to barter for food as sanctions cripple imports”

  1. Here fits a magnificent paragraph from… yes, of course, from Fjordman. Who else :)?

    “Muslims have lots of oil and lots of babies and lots of aggression, but that’s all they have. Otherwise, they’re a spectacular failure. We need them for very little. They need us for virtually everything. We should exploit that. We should separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. They will suffer far more from this than we will. We can start by boycotting the UN, which is now little more than a tool for global sharia, and the Arab Muslims of the West Bank and Gaza, who reinvented themselves as “Palestinians” and started whining at the UN after the Israelis kicked their collective behinds in 1967. “

  2. Iran is busy getting ready for the war that will bring back the Mahdi, the Iranian leaders want hell on earth so the Mahdi will return, they will resist all efforts to remove them and to bring about a peaceful resolution to the current mess.

  3. Iran does not have a lot of babies. Its fertility rate has dropped faster than any other country in history. It has the same number of babies as Western Europe. The problem with Iran is time is running out. When its population reaches old age its oil revenues will have collapsed. In a few years they will be down to 3 million and 330 thousand barrels a day from over 6 million in the late seventies. With a demographic crisis and no money to pay for it, it is hopeless for Iran. The only way out is to buy time and take over the oil fields of its neighbors. Hence the urgency of having the bomb. But actually even it were to achieve its goal the collapse that was predicted for a generation into the future seems to have started now. The currency collapsing is the first sign. It seems Iranian incompetence got there quicker than even the most benign forecasters predicted.

  4. Fjordman is completely unaware of the fact that muslims do not have a lot of babies. Country after country has show incredibly fast demographic decline. Algeria, Tunisia, Iran and of course Turkey where the PM is more than just aware of the demographic picture has declared “1938 to be a disaster for us”. Muslims are unique in having oil which is running out at fast rate and a fast aging population which is not being replaced. They are headed for a disaster. Hence the urgency and craziness of modern times. They know it all and it is moment in history where they can go into oblivion peacefully or go fighting all the way. With the rise of Asia, it seems they have been priced out of world markets for food, as Asians will pay whatever it takes in a food crisis. The muslims are different, with no other source of revenue than depleted oil stocks, a demographic decline which is the fastest in recorded history, and an inability to compete on price on world markets for food, the signs spell only one thing and that is disaster.

  5. Irans population since the 70’s has sky rocketed .Where do you get the info from otherwise pls negro? Are you on about the last decade as there is a large proportion of the country below 35.

    plus all this does is put the rat into a corner but maybe that is what the west wants.

  6. The demographics are skewed toward those under 35 because Iran wasted hundreds of thousands of it’s young men in a war with Iraq during the ’80s.

  7. A war that saw Saddam use poison gas against Iran, that and his using it against the Kurds were the main reasons everyone believed he had them at the beginning of Gulf War II.

  8. United Nations Population Division. True the population did sky rocket and doubled in the time zone you refer to but no more. The current generation has almost completely given up on the future and hence on babies.

    David Goldman explains:
    It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan that at current fertility rates, Iran and Turkey respectively will collapse in a generation or so. Erdogan warned in public that Turkey will cease to exist as a nation by 2038—why he chose that year is unclear to me, but it corresponds to what we read in the UN demographic tables. That feeds into their apocalyptic sense of urgency. Iran sees itself as the center of a great recovery of Sh’ia Islam, and Turkey sees itself as the pillar of a new Ottoman Empire. But given their demographics, they have one generation in which to stake their claim. Ahmadinejad and Erdogan recall Adolf Hitler, who thought that the deterioration of the Aryan race was so far advanced that Germany had only one last chance to assert itself. With that sense of historical pessimism, Hitler was willing to stake everything on one roll of the dice. And a country that despairs of its future is capable of unspeakable acts. If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, we should not be surprised if they are detonated in American cities.

  9. To be sure this info being buried away in the UN stats means that most people believe the lies that moslems tell about their demographic jihad. Even that if looked at from the sober analysis of actual demographers has failed and will continue to fail. For a book which has the information in copious detail with all the relevant charts check out “How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying Too) by David P Goldman. He is also an online columnist with Asian Times Online. I bough a copy a few days ago and I must say it is an excellent read. One quibble with the book is that he takes the current number of moslems in the world as 1.5. You can check the various countries using the CIA stats and do the calculations yourself. This figure if checked out seems to be the high end of the Moslem propaganda and is also not true.