TEHRAN – A focus of the Rouhani administration is to create jobs at the country’s borders though smuggling and security are getting in the way, the interior minister said on Wednesday.

“Job creation at borders is one of the Rouhani administration’s priorities,” ISNA quoted Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli as having said.

Iran shares more than 6,000 kilometers of land borders with Iraq, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to its western hemisphere and with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan to its eastern. 

A major hurdle to border development over the past years has been insecurity and smuggling, mainly due to lax security at the neighboring countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and lately Iraq. 

Job creation at border areas, inter alia, contributes to interior immigration control, a question the country has been increasingly wrestling with over the past years due to climactic changes such as drought periods and a shrinking agriculture sector.“If security and smuggling issues are resolved, we’ll consider establishing infrastructure at our borders,” the senior official stressed while touring a petrochemistry site at Sanandej, capital of the western border province of Kurdistan. 

The country has recently announced it is going to launch more unmanned aircraft patrols across its vast borders, expressing satisfaction with previous experiences. 

Job creation at border areas, inter alia, contributes to interior immigration control, a question the country has been increasingly wrestling with over the past years due to climactic changes such as drought periods and a shrinking agriculture sector. 

In a recent parliamentary speech, Shadmehr Kazemzadeh, who represents the border city of Dehloran from the western Ilam province, called for adopting measures to shore up economy to rein in immigration to central provinces. 

Grossly imbalanced distribution of industries and investments has also made investors less interested in border regions, resulting in a patchy progress across the county, with border provinces being the least privileged as compared to central ones. 

This is while, more than 36 million of the nearly 80-million country live in border provinces, according to a 2012 report. 

Also, another report put out in 2015 indicated unemployment off-the-charts in some provinces, with Golestan, Hormozgan, Mazandaran, and Ilam standing between 30-40 percent.  

AK/PA