Polymers and Iranian Elections; The Oil Minister Calls Some Opposites Crazy: Apart from the “CRUDE OIL” as the most effective gift of the nature to the mankind that changed several regimes and governments, as far as we remember it was only “CUPPER” that affected one country very deeply. Now it seems that polymers will have an effective role in the next Iranian President elections as PIMI pointed in a couple of news.
The Polymer Storey
The storey started two years ago when the deputy of the Industrial Ministry (M. Khosrow Taj) issued a letter and said that selling the polymers via “Iran Mercantile Exchange” is against law and the PC Plants are not obliged to sell their products via “IME“. This order flamed a fire of fight between many associations who were satisfied to buy their materials from the “IME” and those who believed this procedure will destroy the industries.
After two years of paper works, finally the supporters of the “IME” won the battle and all PC plants were legally forced to sell their products via IME. However, during these ping-pong paper works, thousands of plastics converters were shut down and many workers lost their jobs. Almost 90% of the machine manufacturers closed down their production lines and converted their lines to the :After Sales Services of the imported machinery. Even the oldest and most reliable machine manufacturer of Iran (Poolad machine) stated the importing business from Taiwan.
Now during the election debates between the 6 candidates, the number of job losses in the converting plastics industries are considered as the false policies of President Rouhani’s government and the oppositions to President Rouhani believe that his government has lost millions of jobs in this industry in Iran. The opposition is speaking about 600 thousands job for each 1 million polymer materials production.
This conflicts has forced some pro government bodies to defend the case and answer to the opposition. One of them is “Bijan Namdar Zanganeh” the Oil Ministry of Iran, who yesterday called these people: Crazy. Some of the candidates have claimed in their speeches or debates that each 1 million petrochemical product will create 600.000 jobs and so either the Government is lying about investments or they have failed to create the jobs. In answering to these groups the Oil Minister provided an interview. Parts of his long interview is as follow:
- At the best possible situation, each 1 million ton of petrochemicals’ value would be about 1 billion US$. When we add downstream stream industries to this we will get 20% added value and so we may earn 1.2-1.3 billion US$;
- Condemning some presidential candidates, “Bijhan Namdar Zanganeh” explained about the gross production capacity of the Iranian Petchem products and accounted it for 55 million tons. Then considering the NPC total employees and downstream industries, he showed that: All the way we can’t access even to 20.000 work forces, i.e, about 1100 jobs per 1 million ton petchem production;
- Zanganeh then assumed $500 minimum wages for these 600.000 jobs per 1 million US$ productions and its incomes and resulted:”How is it possible to pay about 3.6 billion$ wages from a production that has 1.3 billion$ income?;
- These are the calculations of low knowledge of consultants of the candidates, whereas they can take a piece of paper and a pen and calculate how is it possible?
- At the moment we have allocated 6 million tons of products to our domestic industries with 6 billion US$ value. So, how they can afford to pay the salary of their workers with these dreaming figures?
- With a production of 50 million tons we should have had about 30 million employees now. But do we have such a figure? or we have a high rate of unemployment.
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PIMI: Petrochemical industry could be seen as a nische point for this 12th period of Iranian presidential election.
