Iran faces no disruption to food supplies amid coronavirus pandemic

Iranian agriculture authorities say the country is not short of food supplies despite the new coronavirus pandemic.

Iranian authorities say the country faces no disruption to food supplies amid the new coronavirus pandemic as large-scale government programs for purchase of agrifood from domestic farmers have helped boost inventories.

The spread of the COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has left many countries short of food supplies with reports showing that panic buying by shoppers in developed countries cleared supermarket shelves of staples in the very first days of the pandemic last month.

Iran has been spared of such a disruption to food supplies since COVID-19 cases surfaced in the country in late February.
Over the past calendar year which ended late March, the Iranian government expanded its so-called guaranteed purchase program for agrifood to include fruits, vegetables and other farming products.

That came as better precipitation and a boom in exports had encouraged many farmers to expand cultivation for various fruits and vegetables.

A senior official at the Iranian agriculture ministry (MAJ) said on Sunday that the government had purchased nearly 330,000 metric tons of tomato over the last calendar year.

Hossein Shirzad, who heads Iran’s Central Organization of the Rural Cooperatives (CORC), said that such a huge government scheme for buying a single item of agrifood has been a first of its kind in decades. 
Shirzad said the government has implemented a same strategy for other farming products which faced an oversupply last year.

He said CORC’s purchase of saffron, a relatively expensive spice whose sale in international markets have been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, amounted to 72 tons in the year ending March 19.

MAJ authorities said on Saturday that Iran no longer needed to place huge orders for imports of rice from abroad as production for the grain had increased to reach nearly three million tons at the end of the past calendar year.