The Bread Price Hike in Iran Is Not a Passing Economic Crisis but a Deliberate Starvation Policy to Fund Repression and War

Iran’s economic collapse can no longer be measured only by the exchange rate, inflation, or declining purchasing power. It has now reached the most dangerous and sensitive point of all: bread, the most basic staple for poor and working-class families. The sharp increase in bread prices imposed in Tehran and across many provinces in recent days shows that the ruling regime is no longer merely impoverishing society; it has moved to an even more brutal stage — shifting the cost of its political, security, and military crises directly onto the tables of the poor.

Ali Reza Sedaghat stated in this regard:

“What has taken place in Iran in recent days, with the broad rise in bread prices, cannot be described as a simple economic adjustment or a normal response to market costs. It is a clear expression of a deliberate starvation policy imposed by the regime on Iranian society. When the price of bread — the basic food of millions of poor families — rises in some areas by 70 to 100 percent, it means the regime is placing the poorest classes in direct confrontation with hunger.”

He added:

“The data coming from inside Iran show that these increases are not limited to Tehran. They have spread across many provinces, from Mazandaran and Razavi Khorasan to Hamedan, Semnan, and beyond. In Tehran alone, the price of lavash bread jumped from 14,000 rials to 27,000, barbari rose from 53,000 to 100,000, and sangak climbed from 74,000 to 155,000 rials. These are not merely details of daily life; they are indicators of a collapse in the relationship between the state and society, and proof that the regime is forcing ordinary citizens to pay the price of its corruption, failure, and structural incapacity.”

Sedaghat stressed:

“The real problem is not simply wheat or the cost of bread. It lies in the nature of an economy built by the velayat-e faqih regime on looting, corruption, and the prioritization of security and military spending. Even regime officials themselves have admitted that subsidized flour and wheat account for only a small fraction of the final cost. That means the root of the crisis lies in runaway inflation, soaring energy costs, currency collapse, and entrenched corruption — all of them direct products of the regime’s policies, not external inevitabilities.”

He continued:

“When meat disappears from family tables, then milk, then fruit, and now bread itself comes under threat, we are no longer facing simple economic hardship. We are facing an organized policy designed to push society to the edge of bare biological survival. This is not merely administrative incompetence. It is the direct consequence of a system that prefers to finance repression at home and wars abroad rather than protect the minimum dignity of the Iranian people.”

He concluded:

“What is happening today proves that Iran’s economic crisis is not a technical crisis that can be solved through partial reforms. It is the direct result of a ruling structure built on confiscating national wealth and channeling it toward the regime’s survival. That is why the solution does not lie in new government promises, but in ending the system that has turned even bread into a weapon against the people. As Mrs. Maryam Rajavi has stressed, the only path before the Iranian people is to rise against this imposed reality and confront a regime that squanders the country’s wealth on repression and war while pushing the people into hunger and deprivation.”