"All the commodities that I have bought are imported items. There is a very low number of domestic products in the markets," Mikael Ismail, a resident of Erbil, told Rudaw on Saturday.
Dilshad Yousif, another local, complained that in addition to the massive quantity of imported commodities in the markets, the domestic items are local products “only by name.”
"The available items are imported. And the domestic commodities are local only by name because their ingredients are all imported from outside," Yousif complained.
According to data from the Kurdistan Region's trade and industry ministry, commodities worth 15 billion dollars were imported into the Kurdistan Region in 2022, up from 2021's seven billion worth of imported items.
Businessmen and merchants believe that domestic products cannot compete against imported materials due to their high production costs.
In 2022, the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) trade ministry granted 5,204 licenses to traders to import commodities into the Kurdistan Region, while only 168 businessmen were licensed to export domestic products outside.
The bulk of the imported commodities was from neighboring Iran and Turkey.
According to the trade ministry, 48 percent of food items are imported from Turkey, 17 percent from Iran, and 35 percent are supplied domestically and through some other countries.
More than a thousand companies from 105 countries import food items and other commodities through the airports and border crossings into the Kurdistan Region, according to Gaylan Haji Saeed, head of the Erbil branch of the KRG's exportation and importation union.
"Since Iraq and the Kurdistan Region do not have food security, food items are most of the time imported from outside. Food items come first, followed by construction materials and medicines when it comes to importation," Haji Saeed said.
Despite having fertile soil, the Kurdistan Region often struggles with putting local produce into the market.
Kurdish farmers have on numerous occasions trampled their own agricultural products in protest over low prices, protesting the presence of banned imports that pushed their produce out of the market.
