“As of today, we do not have paper to print the newspaper. Even you cannot find newsprint paper at the price of 30 thousand Tomans on the informal market. If the paper version of the newspaper will not be available from tomorrow on, it will be the result of a threefold ban of paper imports and nothing else.

It’s a good day for those who produce pseudo-newspapers and do not need paper and are waiting for the paper quota to sell.” This was my personal tweet account; which had a simple and objective truth of two words: paper famine.

However, republishing the tweets and reactions was so much that I doubted the simplicity and objectivity of the paper scarcity issue. Maybe we should have written earlier and shouted that over the past month, we have not been able to even buy paper from the informal market at an unusual price, and we have dealt with the problem by borrowing paper at vague future price. There is almost no newsprint in the country, and I am sure there is no hoarding paper. Newsprint and writing paper import statistics are certainly available, and it was enough to compare them with last year’s statistics to understand the declining trend of paper imports, but it seems that there is no supervision.

Prior to this, the role of economic rent in the sales of government paper, unreasonable increase in the price of paper, and … have been the problems, but now the paper famine has put newspapers and magazines under extensive pressure that are actually being published and distributed on kiosks. Contrary to the current imagination, we do not expect government paper to be imported and provided for us at the exchange rate of 4,200 Tomans per USD.

Because in this case, only a large economic rent is distributed, and we ourselves may have to buy the paper of the same publications that are only on the list of paper and subsidies and are not published in practice. The best case scenario is that the price of paper is imported and sold at the real rate and at the free exchange rate.

In the last six months, almost all the experienced merchants and traders in the field have stopped their activities, and those who are active just import paper to the extent that only their relations with paper producers and publications are maintained.

For example, one of the paper importers has not yet cashed our prepaid check in order not to be committed to work in the difficult path of importing and supplying foreign currency. Under these circumstances, independent publications will not be able to be published this week, and most major government newspapers will not be able to be published in the next few weeks. Probably the solution is government intervention to speed up imports, as usual. Why should we expect such measure from the government? The answer is simple: the government bureaucratic system was the basis of such an event.