HRANA News Agency –While turmoil continues to plague the capital city’s bakery market, the head of Tehran Bakers Union has resigned in protest to the government’s broken promises.Meanwhile, some officials continue to ignore their responsibility to fulfill such pledges.
According to a report by Ayande News, although six months has passed since subsidies were removed, the price of bread has increased twice.In comparison to the initial value of flour and bread, the price of wheat flour has increased by fifty percent, and the price of bread has doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in some cases.
The Iranian government had previously promised to compensate bakers for the increase in the cost of gas and electricity which are heavily consumed by this industry.However, since no action has been taken so far, Hossein Nazari, the head of Tehran’s Bakers Union, has tendered his resignation.
On the other hand, since the quality of flour delivered to Tehran’s bakeries has drastically gone down, people refuse to buy the bread.To address this problem and in search of attracting more customers, bakers in Tehran have begun using the flour allotted for other counties.As a result, although the official price of flour in Tehran is approximately $14.25 per sack, some of the bakers are buying higher quality flour at about $17.00 per bag.
All this is happening while the regulatory body monitoring bakeries which operates under the gubernatorial control is facing legal hurdles.The Administrative Court has ordered this regulatory body to report to the Governmental Discretionary Punishments Organization, but provinces refuse to comply with the order.
Furthermore, the government’s failure to address the low quality of bread has created serious problems for bakers and consumers in Tehran such that in search of higher quality product, the owners of some flour plants have attempted to import flour from Australia.
Experts from the outset had emphasized the necessity for controlling the price of bread and had offered suggestions such as the transformation of the system for the procurement, storage and milling of flour and also the ranking of bread according to the quality of the flour used in the baking process.Since the government opposed any and all solutions and insisted on imposing one single price for any type of bread, a large number of bakeries are currently facing big losses while others don’t have enough customers or are struggling with the low quality of the flour shipped to them.To be able to sell bread at a different price, some bakeries have resorted to so called illegal means by adding sesame seeds to the bread available for purchase.
