Three-minute read
In Iran today, hunger isn’t a consequence. It’s a tool.
There was a time when poverty in Iran was framed as collateral damage—of sanctions, war, or global economics. That illusion has collapsed. What we’re witnessing now is something closer to policy. Deliberate. Calculated. A system in which scarcity isn’t solved but maintained—because for the regime, a starving people is a silent one.
On March 24, former budget chief Mohammad Baqer Nobakht admitted what many Iranians already feel in their bones: to patch the gaping hole in the government’s finances, the regime will need to squeeze two quadrillion tomans in taxes out of a collapsing economy. The poor—already crushed under the weight of food inflation, medication shortages, and currency collapse—are expected to carry the burden. “Even with this budget,” Nobakht said, “running the year ahead will be difficult.” Translation: the regime wants more blood from the stone, and it still won’t be enough.
This isn’t fiscal mismanagement. It’s state-sanctioned suffocation.
Ask the average Iranian what’s breaking them, and they won’t say “sanctions.” Even the regime’s own clerics have started to acknowledge the elephant in the room. In Mashhad, Khamenei’s personal envoy, Ahmad Alamolhoda, pointed the finger inward, blaming state-linked institutions for manipulating foreign currency markets and smuggling state-subsidized goods abroad while Iranians at home face unaffordable prices. “Sometimes you wonder,” he said to divert blame, “have certain elements infiltrated the system just to make life unbearable for the people?”
Watch and judge how this insider is warning that #IranRevolution is at the regime's doorsteps. pic.twitter.com/C8ywVnrVJN
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 3, 2023
He posed it like a rhetorical question, but it was a calculated deflection—an attempt to shift blame from the system itself to vague “infiltrators,” as if the corruption were external, not engineered from within.
The economy, as experienced by Iranians, is not merely dysfunctional—it’s hostile. Prices aren’t just rising; they’re spiraling. On the fifth day of the new Persian year, the U.S. dollar crossed 100,000 tomans, an unprecedented collapse of the national currency. Medicine has tripled in price. A decent meal is becoming a luxury. The regime, meanwhile, finds billions to spend on half-baked mega-projects and foreign militias.
Where does the money go? Not into rebuilding trust. That, too, has been pulverized. Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moghaddam, a senior regime official, recently went on state TV and asked Iranians to invest their savings in state-backed firms. He even admitted the regime had a “trust problem” due to past fiascos where citizens’ savings were “powdered”—a euphemism for wiped out. Still, he urged them to try again. Like a thief asking his victim to hand over what little they have left—for the national good, of course.
But the truth is, economic “rescue plans” in Iran always lead to the same destination: the pockets of the regime’s inner circle. Every time citizens are persuaded to put their money into so-called “production companies,” it ends in scandal, bankruptcy, and quiet impunity. These aren’t accidents. They’re part of a controlled system of expropriation—one that sustains the ruling class while keeping the lower classes busy surviving.
While the people of #Iran suffer from hunger and poverty, the regime invests millions in religious influence abroad. Watch and judge the admissions of this #IRGC official pic.twitter.com/XXXYj2dvRS
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 8, 2023
Nowhere is this clearer than in the black economy. Iran’s narcotics trade, according to the regime’s own media, is worth over 300,000 billion tomans. Ninety percent of the world’s opium is “discovered” in Iran. The country is both a corridor and a market—and increasingly, a graveyard. Drugs aren’t just trafficked; they’re used, widely, numbing a generation that might otherwise be marching in the streets.
The same goes for fuel. It was recently revealed that a pipeline had been secretly laid from a restricted airport zone all the way to the sea—built specifically to smuggle fuel. That’s not petty corruption. That’s industrial theft, under military protection.
What do these seemingly unrelated facts have in common? They all point to one truth: the regime relies on a controlled breakdown of the economy, not despite the risk of rebellion—but to prevent it. Misery is not the price of survival. It’s the method of control.
Why are ordinary #Iranians slipping under the #poverty line on a daily basis? pic.twitter.com/WV4ZRiZNua
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 13, 2023
This is a form of governance that doesn’t aim to lift its people—but to exhaust them. To make sure no family can think beyond next week’s rent, no youth can organize beyond their daily hustle, no neighborhood can rise before it is drained of hope. This is what engineered poverty looks like. It’s not a line in a report. It’s the empty refrigerator. The daughter who dropped out of school. The father juggling two jobs and still borrowing for bread.
The clerical regime, for all its hollow sermons, knows exactly what it’s doing. This is economic warfare against its own people, carried out not with tanks, but with ration cards, collapsing currency, and silent bank accounts.
What they fear most isn’t bankruptcy—it’s awakening. Because when a hungry people stop believing the lies and see through the fog of promises and propaganda, they realize they have nothing left to lose.
And that’s when the street stops being quiet.