DUBAI, July 22 (Reuters) - Earlier this month, Iran's national police chief ventured boldly into what has become known as the country's "chicken crisis". The feathers haven't stopped flying since.
The soaring price for a staple food
that Iranians relish cooked with saffron, plums or pomegranates has
become such a hot topic of public debate, and a sign of the sinking
purchasing power of many Iranians, that Police Chief Esmail Ahmadi
Moghaddam felt it his duty to intervene.
He urged television stations to avoid
broadcasting images of people eating chicken, saying such pictures
could fire up social tensions, with perhaps unforeseen consequences.
“Certain people witnessing this
class gap between the rich and the poor might grab a knife and think
they will get their share from the wealthy,” Mehr news agency
quoted him as saying.
As far as is known, no one has gone to
that extreme, but as Iran’s economy struggles with erratic government
management and international sanctions imposed over the country’s
disputed nuclear programme, prices of food and fuel have jumped
across the board in the past 18 months.
At around 65,000 rials, or over $5 at
the official exchange rate, a kilo (2.2 lb) of chicken is now nearly
three times the price it was a year ago. That makes it hard to afford
for many in a country where gross national income per capita was
about $4,520 in 2009, or $377 per month, according to the most recent
estimate by the World Bank.
The surge in the price is mainly due to
the exorbitant cost of importing chicken feed with Iran’s weakened
currency, which on the black market is more than 40 percent lower
against the U.S. dollar than it was at the start of this year.
DINNER TABLES
With chicken becoming rarer on middle-
and working-class dinner tables, many Iranians are expressing their
frustration with mordant humour.
Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, who
lives in France, mocked Ahmadi Moghaddam’s warning with a cartoon of
a young man watching a pornographic film. His father tries to cover
up only the image of a roast chicken in the background of the film,
saying: “How many times have I told you not to watch films with
chicken in them?”
Photographer Arash Ashoorinia published
on his website a range of images showing delectable chicken dishes.
“It’s possible that publishing these kinds of photos will be
banned. Of course I had many more beautiful photos, but I wouldn’t
want to act against national security!” he wrote underneath.
Iran’s social networks are buzzing.
“There are two classes of people: below the chicken line and
above the chicken line,” quipped one Twitter posting from a
Shiraz resident.
Another tweet joked that instead of
asking for traditional gold coins, soon-to-be-married Iranian women
would request dowries of 200 tonnes of chicken.
Officials, worried about popular
resentment, have done their best to assure irate Iranians that
chicken will be in plentiful supply and at fair prices.
There have been widely announced fines
for those found to be profiteering, proclamations on the provision of
government-subsidised chicken for the holy month of Ramadan, and
reassurances that tonnes of healthy stock will soon be available at
market.
Pictures of queues of people hoping to
buy government-subsidised chicken have been widely carried in
state-influenced Iranian media in the last several weeks – apparently
to demonstrate that the government is addressing the problem.
Officials maintain Iran has endured
more than three decades of economic sanctions and can withstand
plenty more. Some government figures, including President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, have described the sanctions as a blessing that will
wean the country off foreign goods and dependence on oil income.
But for now, at least, Iran’s chicken
industry remains dependent on the outside world. Much of the soya
beans and corn fed to broiler chickens is imported from abroad.
Talking to Reuters by telephone, a
veteran chicken producer in Iran, who asked not to be named, blamed
the price rises on government mismanagement as well as the sanctions.
“Around half the chicken farms
have stopped production because it has become too expensive to buy
the imported raw materials,” he said, citing the sharp increases
in the cost of feed and imported vaccines.
“We are so sorry about the
situation but it’s impossible to bring the price down. It’s very
upsetting for so many Iranians.”
POLITICS
With opposition activity in Iran
tightly controlled, the chicken crisis, and the country’s general
economic distress, look unlikely for now to prompt wide protests that
could challenge the government’s hold on power.
But the price of chicken has become an
issue in national politics, where some anti-Ahmadinejad members of
parliament are publicly denouncing rivals in the executive branch for
failing to prepare for the crisis.
“Livestock and poultry dealers
gave warnings eight months ago about the lack of hay and feed,”
said Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s parliament and a rival to
Ahmadinejad, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency.
Ahmadinejad has faced increasing
criticism over his economic record since introducing reforms in 2010
that withdrew generous subsidies to nearly all Iranians in favour of
cash handouts; the reforms have contributed to inflation.
Although the government’s policy of
supplying subsidised chicken has partially eased the problem, as a
public relations gesture it risks backfiring by reminding some
Iranians of the worst days of the economy during the devastating
Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s.
“There are queues for chicken
every day,” said Ayhan, a university professor living in Tehran.
“It reminds me of 1981.”
