TEHRAN - Iranian farmers produced 2.6 million tons of rice during the current Iranian calendar year (started on March 20), according to Director-General of the Agriculture Ministry's Grains and Essential Goods Department Faramak Aziz-Karimi.

The mentioned production was cultivated in 800,000 hectares of land across the country, Mehr News Agency reported.

He put the country’s total annual demand for rice at about three million tons and said: "Considering the level of cultivation this year, domestic production meets about 85 percent of the country's needs."

According to the official, this year, mechanized harvesting was carried out on about 690,000 hectares of land, which shows a 10 percent increase compared to the previous year.

Aziz-Karimi had previously said that the average area under rice cultivation in the country in the past three years was about 605,000 hectares, of which 70 percent is concentrated in Gilan and Mazandaran provinces (about 427,000 hectares).

Iran produced 2.9 million tons of rice during the past Iranian calendar year of 1398 (ended on March 19).

In October 2019, Deputy Agriculture Minister Abdolmehdi Bakhshandeh had announced, “Iran has become completely self-sufficient in rice production as it plans to cut up to two million tons of imports a year.”

The Statistical Center of Iran estimates that Iranians consume approximately 35 kilograms of rice per person each year. That would mean a domestic demand of nearly three million tons for a country of 83 million people.

Bakhshandeh said rice self-sufficiency would save Iran more than $1.1 billion in imports, adding that it would also be a major success amid efforts to minimize the impacts of the American sanctions on food security in the country.

EF/MA