Iran does not need to import wheat in the year to March 2007 because local production will meet demand but a wheat shipment for strategic reserves will arrive in May, the state wheat buyer said on Saturday.
Iran's Governmental Trading Corporation (GTC), which imports wheat and other goods, has said in the past that Iran was self-sufficient in wheat but has subsequently issued tenders to import the grain.
"We do not need to import wheat this year ... as the Agriculture Ministry estimates this year's wheat harvest to be around 12.3 million tonnes," GTC head Mohammad Sadeq Mofatteh told a news conference on Saturday.
"Our domestic consumption will be between 10.5 million tonnes and 11 million tonnes," Mofatteh said. "Even if we harvest some 11 million tonnes as we did last year, we can still satisfy our domestic consumption."
Mofatteh said Iran boosted the country's strategic reserves with imports of 1.2 million tonnes of wheat in the past year, with a final shipment to make up that amount arriving in May.
He said that this year even strategic reserves could be met by local production.
Iran - previously a big importer of wheat from Canada, Australia and Argentina - said it was self-sufficient in 2004 although it continued imports after that time.
Mofatteh also repeated his December statement that the GTC was going to import 450,000 tonnes of raw sugar to regulate the domestic market, which had a deficit of 700,000 to 800,000 tonnes a year.
Mofatteh said Iran's sugar consumption was around 1.9 million tonnes, some 1.1 million of which was produced domestically.
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