Iran to focus on export and tomato paste to overcome production surplus

Iran's tomato production exceeds 6 MMT/year which puts the country on the 2nd rank in the Middle East tomato production after Turkey.
Iranian tomato growers and exporters are looking to explore new opportunities in Central Asia and Russia in order to prevent the deflation of tomato production surplus caused by border closures and decreasing domestic consumption.
In the past years, the Central Organization for Rural Cooperatives of Iran (CORC) used to purchase the excess quantities and this purchase led to put Iran's focus on processing tomatoes into producing tomato paste. For this purpose, CORC has been purchasing 300 KMT of unprocessed raw tomatoes.