Ma'moulan fig sector reports 10 trillion tomans in annual turnover, ISNA says

Annual turnover in the fig sector of Ma'moulan, an Iranian county whose figs are marketed as a national agricultural brand, has reached 10 hemat, or 10 trillion tomans, the Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) reported, citing the county's governor.

The governor described Ma'moulan figs as one of Iran's recognised agricultural brands and said the crop holds second place in the Middle East for fig production after Turkey. ISNA published the turnover figure without an accompanying tonnage, planted area, price series or export breakdown.

What 10 hemat means

Hemat is the shorthand Iranian officials and media use for hezar miliard toman — one thousand billion tomans, or one trillion tomans. Ten hemat therefore equals 10 trillion tomans and, at the fixed legal ratio of ten rials to one toman, 100 trillion rials.

Converting that into hard currency is where the figure becomes difficult to use. ISNA did not attach an exchange rate or a reference period to the number, and Iran has operated multiple parallel rates for years, so the same toman total translates into materially different dollar or euro values depending on which rate is applied. The report also does not specify whether the 10 hemat covers farmgate sales only or the full chain through drying, packing and wholesale distribution.

Year-on-year comparisons carry the same caveat. Turnover reported in tomans rises with domestic inflation and with the currency's depreciation even when harvested volumes are flat or falling, so a growing headline number is not evidence of a growing crop. Without a volume series beside it, the total cannot be separated into a price effect and a quantity effect.

The ranking behind the claim

The second-place claim is attributed to the governor and is not tied in the ISNA item to a statistical agency. Several elements are left open:

• whether the ranking refers to fresh figs, dried figs or both;
• whether it is measured by volume or by value;
• which year or harvest season it refers to;
• whether second place belongs to Ma'moulan itself or to Iran as a whole, with the county cited as the flagship growing area.

Turkey is the reference point under either reading. It is the dominant supplier in the international dried fig trade, and any Middle Eastern ranking is effectively a contest for the position behind it.

Why a county-level number matters to the trade

Figs are a small crop by tonnage but a high-value one per kilogram, and dried fig supply is concentrated in a handful of origins. Iranian material competes mainly as an alternative origin rather than as a price setter. Buyers who follow the category track it through provincial harvest reports and processor capacity rather than through national trade statistics, which for Iranian food products are published irregularly and complicated by sanctions-related payment and shipping frictions.

That is what makes a county-level turnover figure worth noting even without supporting volumes: it is one of the few public indications of the scale of a specific Iranian fig cluster. For it to be usable in sourcing or investment decisions, the missing variables — tonnes harvested, orchard hectares, dried-to-fresh conversion, share exported and destination markets — would need to be published alongside it. Until then, the 10 hemat figure describes the commercial weight of the district's fig economy in local currency and little else.