Iran’s dairy intake less than half recommended level as prices soar

The three villages are Shafiabad in Kerman Province, Kandolus in Mazandaran Province and Soheili on Qeshm Island. Together, they represent Iran’s northern forests, central deserts and southern coasts.

Shafiabad, located on the edge of the Lut Desert, is known for its Qajar-era caravanserai and the surrounding sand dunes and “kaluts,” the wind-shaped desert formations that draw travelers and photographers from around the world.

Kandolus, in the green slopes of the Alborz Mountains, is famous for its traditional stone houses, handicrafts, and hiking trails through the Hyrcanian forests. With thousands of years of history, it is one of northern Iran’s oldest rural settlements and a model for cultural tourism.

Soheili, a coastal village on Qeshm Island, has become a leader in eco-tourism and community-based conservation, according to the Iranian Tourism Organization.

Villagers help protect the Hara Mangrove Forests, promote quiet and clean boating, and welcome visitors with local seafood, crafts, and star-filled night skies.

UN Tourism’s “Best Tourism Villages” program honors rural destinations that protect their natural environment, celebrate local traditions, and create opportunities for local communities.

“Our Best Tourism Villages 2025 highlight communities that are working to safeguard their cultural heritage, preserve their natural resources and create economic opportunities through tourism,” UN Tourism Secretary General Zurab Pololikashvili said in a statement.

In total, 52 villages from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East received the recognition, selected from over 270 applications from 65 UN Tourism Member States.

From vanishing water reserves and dried wetlands to fragile cities, failing infrastructure and a fossil-fuel-dependent economy, decades of reactive decisions have set the country on an unmistakably unsustainable path.

Iran now stands on the brink of “water bankruptcy,” a term describing when consumption far exceeds natural replenishment.

Over-extraction from aquifers, unchecked dam-building, inter-basin transfers, and ill-planned agricultural projects have left more than 500 plains suffering groundwater collapse and land subsidence—what experts call a “silent earthquake.” In some areas, land sinks by more than 20 centimeters a year.

Hundreds of villages across central and eastern Iran now lack safe drinking water, triggering waves of climate-driven migration.

The crisis no longer threatens only agriculture and food security but the country’s social stability and national security.

No climate plan

Iran is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.

Rising temperatures, shrinking snowfall, extended droughts and intensifying dust storms reveal the scale of change, yet the country still lacks a national adaptation plan.

Limited engagement with international scientific bodies, poor climate data and a reactive policy mindset have weakened its ability to respond.

While many countries invest in innovations like smart farming and early-warning systems for floods and droughts, Tehran’s measures remain short-term and unsustainable.

Cities Strained

In five decades, Iran has urbanized at one of the fastest rates globally—without the infrastructure or governance to match.

Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Ahvaz now face toxic air, crumbling public services, decaying neighborhoods, and growing informal settlements.

Municipal priorities lean toward costly showcase projects instead of building resilient, livable cities.

As a result, Iran’s urban quality-of-life indicators remain far below global averages, and its cities are increasingly vulnerable to earthquakes and floods.

Self destruction

Iran’s economy remains tethered to the overuse of natural resources and fossil fuels, eroding efficiency and environmental security.

Agriculture, despite contributing little to GDP, consumes more than 90% of the nation’s water—often to grow water-intensive crops like rice and pistachios in arid zones.

Inefficient subsidies for energy and water encourage overconsumption, soil degradation and aquifer depletion. Heavy reliance on oil and gas fuels pollution and delays a shift toward a green economy.

Unlike many of its neighbors, Iran still lacks a binding strategy for renewable energy—a gap that risks locking the country into technological stagnation and environmental decline.

Governance at the core

At its core, Iran’s crisis stems less from a lack of natural resources than from weak governance and fragmented decision-making.

Years of unscientific, short-term policymaking and exclusion of civil and expert institutions from decision processes have eroded the capacity for sustainable development.

Centralized, project-based management continues to dominate where transparency, public participation and local knowledge could drive meaningful solutions.

Sustainable development is no longer optional. It is vital to Iran’s survival.

Continuing the current course—from vanishing wetlands and land subsidence to air pollution and climate migration—will erode the country’s ecological and human foundations.

Reversing course will demand a new development model—one built on sustainable water management, restored aquifers, reformed crop patterns, national climate adaptation, urban renewal and investment in clean energy.

Yet these are tall orders—and they appear far down the list of priorities for rulers consumed by political rather than ecological survival.

“The country’s greatest asset is its faithful and revolutionary people,” Rouhollah Momen-Nasab, head of Tehran’s headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, told reporters. “By activating 80,000 trained personnel, we can bring about major transformation in the province even before relying on large state budgets,” he said.

He announced the formation of a “chastity and hijab situation room” involving cultural and executive bodies, inviting citizens to join a network of local observers to help promote what he described as social discipline and religious values.

Momen-Nasab described the group’s response to what he called a “cognitive and cultural war” as data-driven and multi-layered, with monitoring and policy recommendations sent to relevant authorities. The organization, he said, will also push institutions through legal and audit channels to fulfill their “statutory duties.”

Momen-Nasab said the headquarters was coordinating with the prosecutor’s office and cyber police to monitor online and streaming platforms, warning that “virtual spaces and VODs must not be safe havens for lawbreakers.”

The renewed push comes as most Iranians continue to oppose mandatory hijab rules. A 2022 survey by Netherlands-based GAMAAN found more than 70 percent of Iranian men and women opposed compulsory veiling.

For Iran’s leadership, however, enforcement of hijab laws remains a pillar of political legitimacy. Since Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022, women appearing unveiled in public have turned defiance into a sustained act of civil protest.

In recent weeks, authorities have sealed cafés and restaurants across cities for noncompliance after outcry by hardliners. Police warned that all businesses “must observe current laws.”

For eighty-four years, he lived between art and truth and chose the latter as his art.

When he could no longer make films because Iran's theocratic system would not let him, he endured in silence. That moral stillness, that refusal, will grant him a kind of immortality no monument could.

It might sound sentimental, but it’s no small thing to hold on to principles that offer no promise of survival: to keep saying no to censor when yes could buy you comfort.

Most people take the deal and call it success. For Taghvai, success meant honesty, even if it meant silence. He chose to stop working than betray the essence of his work and bow to censors.

For years, he chose quiet over compromise, teaching instead of directing, living modestly but faithfully to an idea of cinema that no longer seemed to belong to this world.

'Found freedom' in death

Taghvai died on October 14, 2025. The modern world—obsessed with visibility, market value, and the algorithmic myth of individuality—has little patience for those who stand apart.

Everyone believes they are unique; artists are sure of it. But there is a difference between those who merely believe it and those who live it. Most pass through history collecting, as Andy Warhol once put it, their fifteen minutes of fame.

Others—those like Nasser Taghvai—shape history from within.

His wife, the filmmaker Marzieh Vafamehr, announced his passing with a single, luminous sentence: “Nasser Taghvai, the artist who chose the difficulty of living free, has found freedom.”

That line captures him entirely: liberation through honesty, not survival through compromise.

The smell of oil and the sea

Taghvai was born in 1941 in Abadan, a city poised between refinery and sea—between modernity and tradition. The geography of the south shaped his eyes: the heat, the salt, the rhythm of labor and myth.

He studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, but it was life, not books, that made him a filmmaker.

His early documentaries of the 1960s, such as Wind of Jinn (1969), were meditations on fear, faith, and freedom. For him, cinema was never entertainment; it was knowledge in motion. He helped forge the Iranian New Wave, replacing sentimentality with silence, rhythm, and thought.

In Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1970), he dissected authoritarian family structures so precisely it was banned. In Sadegh Kordeh (1972), he brought Iran’s forgotten peripheries to the center. In My Uncle Napoleon (1976), he revealed—through humor and tenderness—a society haunted by its own mistrust.

After the 1979 Revolution, in a suffocating climate of censorship, he made Captain Khorshid (1985), a southern reimagining of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. A parable of courage and dignity, it won the Locarno Prize and remains one of Iran’s cinematic masterpieces.

Later came Hey Iran, a satire that turned laughter into rebellion, and Paper Without Lines, a meditation on imagination and identity.

“When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films”

His final project, Bitter Tea, about the Iran–Iraq War, was shut down. His response was austere and unforgettable: “When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films.”

For Taghvai, not making a film was itself an act of art—a decision against deception.

Across his work, one theme persisted: resistance to power and deceit. In Tranquility in the Presence of Others, madness defies authority.

In Captain Khorshid, honor resists betrayal. In Hey Iran, laughter dismantles militarism.

His cinema was intellectual yet humane, philosophical yet popular. He never mocked his audience; he invited them to think.

“The camera is not just an eye; It’s a conscience”

Taghvai was not only a filmmaker but a teacher of filmmakers. For him, cinema was not a profession but a way of perceiving. Generations of Iranian directors learned from his credo “the camera is not just an eye—it’s a conscience.”

He lived between presence and absence: present in his images, absent in his long silences. He refused to lie for visibility, to flatter power for memory, or to compromise for survival. “Art that isn’t honest isn’t art,” he once said.

In a world where art is often reduced to advertisement, he proved that honesty is the hardest, most enduring form of resistance. Even in stillness, he made the loudest noise.

His death is not just a farewell to a filmmaker. It is an invitation to remember that independence in art means standing against power without shouting — to be quiet, and yet remain unforgettable.

Located near Saint Sarkis Armenian Church in downtown Tehran, the Saint Mary (Maryam-e Moghaddas) station features large reliefs of Jesus and Mary.

“The station was built to honor Saint Mary and to demonstrate the coexistence of divine religions in Tehran,” Mayor Alireza Zakani posted on X earlier this week.

Conservative media welcomed the move as proof of Iran’s tolerance.

“Respect in Iran for religious and cultural diversity is unparalleled, yet these matters receive no coverage in Western media!” wrote hardline commentator Ehsan Movahedian on X.

The Revolutionary Guards-linked Fars News Agency claimed that “foreign social media users, recalling grim portrayals of Iran and the lives of its minorities in mainstream media, have described such narratives as part of a Western agenda with anti-Iranian motives.”

Others were less impressed.

Journalist Azadeh Mokhtari mocked municipality-run daily Hamshahri, which splashed ‘Global Reactions to Saint Mary Metro’ on its Wednesday front page.

“Global reaction?” Mokhtary quipped on X, “their jaws must have dropped for sure that you built one metro line. And your even bigger act of genius is that you named it Holy Mary?”

Opposition voices were sharper still.

“Why the ‘Mary Metro’? Because the Islamic Republic is desperate,” wrote a user posting as Cyrus the Great. “It’s trying to polish its global image and manipulate Western audiences, especially conservatives and religious figures like Donald Trump.”

“Don’t be fooled,” the user added. “By falling for this propaganda, you’re helping the same dictatorship that has oppressed the people of Iran for decades.”

Christians in Iran: Rights and Restrictions

Iran’s constitution recognizes Zoroastrians, Jews, Armenians, and Assyrian-Chaldeans as religious minorities, granting them limited rights to worship, manage schools, and hold parliamentary seats.

But these protections exclude Muslim-born converts to Christianity.

Existing churches may admit only members of their own communities, and no new churches can be established.

While Christian holidays are officially observed, all activities remain under state supervision.

Apostasy and the Threat of Persecution

Muslim-born converts often worship secretly in “house churches,” risking arrest on charges such as “acting against national security” or “propaganda against the system.”

Missionary activity is banned.

Armenian-born pastor Joseph Shahbazian, accused of leading a house church, was sentenced in 2022 to ten years in Evin Prison.

Courts have also intervened in family cases—including a 2020 ruling in Bushehr ordering a Christian convert couple to surrender their adopted child.

Though executions for apostasy have ceased since 1990, converts such as Yousef Nadarkhani, Mehdi Dibaj, and Hamid Soodmand have faced death sentences in the past.

Apostasy remains prosecutable under Sharia or clerical fatwas, even without explicit codification in Iran’s penal law.

The contrast between Tehran’s public tributes and its private punishments has become a familiar script—one no metro station can disguise.