Volume of Iran’s Foreign Trade Increases despite Sanctions

Head of Iran’s Customs Office Mehdi Mir Ashrafi announced that the country’s volume of exports and imports hit a record high despite the harsh US sanctions.

Mir Ashrafi said on Saturday that the overall weight of shipments exported from Iran and imported into the country in the 12-month period ending on March 19 had exceeded 170 million tons.

He added that the value of annual trade between Iran and other countries also topped $85 billion, saying that the figure was a major achievement for a country that was under the harshest sanctions imposed by the United States.

In relevant remarks on Thursday, Governor of the Central Bank of Iran Abdolnasser Hemmati said that despite tolerating the US harshest sanctions, the country’s economy has sustained no irrecoverable harms thanks to the CBI’s measures.

Hemmati said on Thursday that Iran, already grappling with the worst of economic problems caused by the US sanctions, is successfully coping with the impacts of a coronavirus outbreak that is battering many other economies around the world.

“That is a sign the CBI, within its own means, has managed to neutralize many of the (economic) blows and prevent harsh damage to the economy,” he wrote on his Instagram page marking the end of the Iranian calendar year.

Hemmati said the fiscal year of 1398 was one of the worst on record for Iran in terms of outside shocks and their impacts on the day-to-day life of the Iranians.

However, the chief banker said that those problems failed to undermine the country’s overall financial and economic stability and even prompted the CBI to implement a series of deep monetary and forex policy reforms.

“Our country was hit by the harshest of economic storms in an unfair and oppressive manner … the arbitrary and unilateral American sanctions, the deep shock on oil exports, intensive restrictions on banking exchanges … and finally the spread of coronavirus in the country,” said Hemmati, adding that each one of those shocks would be enough to cause an economy to crumble.