Iraq's Council of Ministers imposes 25% customs duty on imported tomato paste to protect domestic producers

Mechanism

At its 13 November 2025 (45th regular) session, Iraq's Council of Ministers — chaired at the time by PM Mohammed Shia' Al-Sudani — approved "imposing a customs duty on imported tomato paste at a rate of 25%, for a period of four years without reduction, to be implemented four months from the date of issuance," per the Prime Minister's Media Office statement republished verbatim across Iraqi outlets (Baghdad Today, Al-Jeebal, Ultra Iraq, Mosul Time, Dijlah TV, Hatha Alyoum). The legal basis cited is Law No. 11 of 2011 (as amended), Iraq's domestic-product-protection statute — the same instrument invoked in Iraq's other 2025-26 import-substitution tariff moves (oxygen/dairy additional duties, Cabinet Decision 957's broader tariff-schedule rebracketing).

The duty took effect 13 March 2026, four months after the November announcement, and is fixed at 25% for four years with no scheduled step-down — a longer, flatter protection window than typical Iraqi additional-duty decrees, which usually specify a declining-rate glide path.

Iraq's official cabinet.iq/pmo.iq/ina.iq portals return bot-protection challenges (HTTP 403) to automated fetches, consistent with prior IPTM filings on Iraqi Council of Ministers decisions this cycle. The PMO's own article on the 45th session (confirmed live via search-engine indexing, matching session number, chair and date) is used as the primary source; six independent Iraqi outlets corroborate the same rate, duration and legal basis, all attributed to the same PM Media Office statement.

Downstream implications

• Files alongside Iraq's other Law 11/2011 import-substitution tariffs from

the same period — the 30 December 2025 oxygen/dairy additional-duty decree (2025-12-30-iraq-additional-customs-duties-oxygen-dairy) and the broader Cabinet Decision 957 tariff-schedule rebracketing (2025-12-30-iraq-cabinet-decision-957-hybrid-vehicle-gold-tariff) — as part of a sustained late-2025/early-2026 Iraqi push to raise import duties across food and consumer-goods lines under fiscal and domestic-industry pressure.

• Raises landed cost for tomato-paste exporters into Iraq; GTA identifies

China and Turkiye as the largest supplier-origin countries by volume, though the duty is not discriminatory by origin.

• A four-year fixed-rate window (no step-down) signals a longer domestic-

industry protection horizon than Iraq's typical additional-duty decrees.

Open questions

• Whether Iraq's domestic tomato-paste processing capacity (e.g., Al-Takamul

Al-Arabi and other local producers) can scale to meet demand at the new price floor, or whether the duty primarily raises consumer prices without a matching supply response.

• Whether the measure draws the same Federal Supreme Court

Article-28-authority challenge (cabinet decree vs. parliamentary law) that is contesting Cabinet Decision 957.