If you have money everything is available in any quantity you want BUT food and rent prices have sky-rocketed for basics where it takes THREE jobs a day per family member to cover costs of rent, utilities, transportation and food for the average person. A single tomato can sometimes cost 10% of a daily salary!
Exacerbating the situation is the Islamic government fails to pay factory and office workers their salaries for as long a nine months at a time. So foraging for bits of bread and food in garbage bins has become an imperative necessity for survival even for families with an employed bread winner!
Many families send people to garbage dumps to wait for arriving garbage trucks and try to sift out anything they can eat or use. Photos of this exist.
The female members of families are consumers but cannot contribute to revenues as jobs are mostly tailored/acceptable for men and in VERY short supply for men, so women, wives and daughters, have to turn to prostitution to bring in money. Or to sit and beg for alms in the streets along with HALF A MILLION homeless children striving to survive a harsh life — in Tehran alone!
Life pressures have turned about 30% of the men into drug ADDICTS and another 20% into drug users to try to ease their misery and hoplessness.
Browse around on AntiMullah.com and the SEVEN Linked sub-pages for photos and articles on this and related challenges in Iran.
Food is mostly imported, yes. Agriculture has suffered badly through mismanagement and is no longer sufficient to feed the people even in many farming communities. Partly because of insufficient water availability with a poor maintenance of the Qanats (underground water streams that require regular removal of silt).
Look at AntiMullah postings on Egypt. (News Views? World Views?) That’s a similar problem with different givens.
Do the people of Iran consume Ethanol?