Major Challenges in Agricultural Imports: Why Are Traders Stuck at the Food and Drug Administration?

One of the biggest problems in importing agricultural products, especially rice and tea, is the lengthy process of registering sources. Each importing company must register the source separately, which takes at least one to two months to review and sign the source approval. This process, which is carried out by the Food and Drug Administration (Fakhr Razi Branch), takes a long time due to repeated expert reviews for the same sources and going through the hierarchy such as signature approval for a duplicate source for each company.

However, if this factory registration is reviewed and approved once for all importers and once for each source, approval is received from the experts and the general manager of the organization, there is no need to approve the signatures of the experts and the general manager each time, which sometimes takes one to two months in the signature process and is expensive.

As a result, this review and the form filling and duplicate signatures will be challenging for a producing source. Today, we see that tea and rice files are sometimes pending for two to three months due to duplicate signatures. This process is not only time-consuming, but also creates work traffic for the Food and Drug Administration and importers. One suggestion is that if the duplicate source is approved and signed once by experts and the Director General, there is no need to spend several months in the signature cycle process for many times. As a result, importers will only pay the registration fee, without having to go through long, repetitive steps.

One of the new problems that importers are facing is the seasonal and quota-based order registration. According to the new laws of Ministry of Agriculture-Jihad, importers must register orders at specific times and if they act late, their quota will run out. Also, the amount of quota provided for new companies is so low that it does not have an economic justification for importing goods and has practically faced the challenge of non-importation and as a result, unemployment of personnel. This problem is especially prominent in products that are imported under quota. Importers should be familiar with the exact timing of registering orders so as not to miss their opportunities.