Iran’s Deputy Industry Minister Hossein Modares Khiabani announced that his country has exported $32 billion of non-oil goods in last 10 months, adding that it is a significant achievement for Tehran which is under the US sanctions.
“This is like a miracle in the current economic situation of the country” that Iran has exported $32 billion of non-oil goods so far in the current Persian year ending March 21, 2020, Modares Khiabani told an exports quality summit in Tehran on Tuesday.
The Iranian economy has been carrying on at a relatively steady clip after a period of turmoil when the Trump administration unleashed its most ferocious economic attack on the country in November 2018 with a pledge to sink its oil exports to zero.
The sanctions are part of Washington’s “maximum pressure” policy which the US administration hopes would ultimately force Iran to negotiate a sweeping deal, covering its ballistic missile program and its role in Middle East.
The Islamic Republic, however, has held its ground and said it will not renegotiate a 2015 nuclear deal which President Donald Trump abandoned in May 2018 and announced the most draconian sanctions ever on the country.
“Non-oil exports have almost replaced oil exports, and the country is governed by the revenues of the non-oil sector,” Modares Khiabani said.
However, the Trump administration is gerrymandering, tweaking the contours of its supposed sanctions relief from time to time to put more aspects of the Iranian economy under strain.
Washington’s unilateral sanctions against Tehran began in November 2018, five months after US President Donald Trump withdrew from an international deal on Iran’s nuclear program.
Claiming that the bans were working properly, Trump tightened them in May 2019, only to see that Iran was finding new solutions to recoup the losses.
Iranian officials started planning for policies to counter the US possible sanctions a year before Donald Trump entered into office in early 2017. The policies are now proving effective as economic indexes are indicating inefficacy of the US pressures.
Early in July, Iranian Industry Minister Reza Rahmani said that despite US efforts to cripple Tehran’s economy, year-on-year comparison showed that the country’s domestic production increased in the first quarter of the local calendar year (March 21-June 21).