Iraq Council of Ministers imposes 75% additional customs duty on paper napkins, 30% on polystyrene food containers

Mechanism

Iraq's cabinet bundled two protectionist tariff measures into its 10 August 2025 (32nd regular) session, structured as flat additional ad-valorem duties layered on top of Iraq's existing customs tariff schedule rather than as formal HS tariff-schedule amendments:

• Paper napkins/tissues (المناديل الورقية): +75% additional duty on the

unit of measure of imported product, all origins, for a fixed four-year term.

• White polystyrene plates and food-storage containers (الصحون

والحافظات البيضاء المصنوعة من مادة حبيبات البولي ستايرين لحفظ الطعام): +30% additional duty on the unit of measure, all origins, also four years.

Both measures share a 120-day implementation delay from the 10 August 2025 announcement, landing the effective start date at 10 December 2025 (matching Global Trade Alert's recorded implementation date), and both require domestic-market monitoring for the duration of the additional duty.

Iraq's official gazette and Council of Ministers/PMO portals (cabinet.iq, pmo.iq, ina.iq) return bot-protection challenges (Cloudflare) to automated fetches from this VPS, so this filing relies on Al-Rasheed Media's published full text of the session's decisions — a state-linked satellite channel that quotes the operative decision language verbatim — corroborated by Economy News's independent report of the same session naming the same two products and duty rates.

Downstream implications

• One of a series of Iraqi Council of Ministers additional-duty decrees from

the same 2025 fiscal cycle (see also the 30 December 2025 oxygen/dairy decree and the 13 November 2025 tomato-paste duty, both in the same fiscal-tariff-reform cluster) — Iraq is running a rolling program of product-specific import-substitution tariffs rather than a single comprehensive schedule rewrite.

• Paper-tissue and food-service-packaging importers (largely sourcing from

China, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia per GTA) face a 75%/30% cost step-up with a four-year floor, incentivising either domestic paper-converting capacity build-out or trade diversion to origins with lower landed cost even after the duty.

• Consistent with the same 120-day-delay and "protect domestic industry"

template used in Iraq's other 2025 additional-duty decrees, suggesting a standardised cabinet mechanism for these measures.

Open questions

• Whether a primary Iraqi government URL (pmo.iq / cabinet.iq /

customs.mof.gov.iq) becomes fetchable in a future audit pass — all three returned Cloudflare 403 to automated retrieval at filing time despite being confirmed live via search-engine indexing.

• Whether Iraq's domestic paper-converting and food-packaging manufacturing

base can absorb the implied import substitution, or whether these duties see the ad-hoc carve-outs observed in other recent Iraqi additional-duty decrees.