Iraq Council of Ministers imposes 40% additional customs duty on oxygen, 30% on yogurt/liquid milk imports

Mechanism

Iraq's cabinet bundled two protectionist tariff measures into a single 30 December 2025 session, both structured as flat additional ad-valorem duties layered on top of Iraq's existing customs tariff schedule rather than as formal tariff-schedule (HS) amendments:

• Medical and industrial oxygen (gaseous and liquid): +40% additional

duty on the unit of measure of imported product, all origins, for a fixed four-year term. Rationale given was protection of domestic pharmaceutical/industrial-gas production capacity.

• Yogurt and liquid milk: +30% additional duty on the unit of measure,

all origins, open-ended (no stated sunset), to protect local dairy manufacturers.

Both measures share a 120-day implementation delay from the 30 December 2025 announcement — landing the effective start date at 29 April 2026 — explicitly to give importers time to adjust supply contracts. This is the date GTA records as the intervention's implementation date for the dairy line (state-act 95874 / intervention 151718).

Iraq's official gazette and Council of Ministers portal (cabinet.iq, pmo.iq, ina.iq) return bot-protection challenges to automated fetches, so this filing relies on the Iraqi state news agency (INA) session listing — confirmed to exist and titled to match the 30 December Tuesday session via search-engine indexing — corroborated by two independent Iraqi outlets (Al-Rasheed Media, a state-linked satellite channel, and Iraq Business News, an independent English-language trade-press outlet) that both attribute the same rates, durations and 120-day delay to a Prime Minister's Media Office statement.

Downstream implications

• Adds to a fast-growing list of Iraqi additional-duty decrees from the same

cabinet cycle (nitrogen gas +40%, announced 27 December 2025, three days earlier) — a pattern of ad-hoc protectionist duties on industrial gases and staple foods rather than a single comprehensive tariff-schedule reform.

• The oxygen duty raises input costs for Iraqi hospitals and industrial gas

users (welding, steel, water treatment) that rely on imported oxygen where domestic production capacity is insufficient — a food/health-security trade-off against the stated import-substitution goal.

• The dairy duty mirrors the erga-omnes staple-food tariff reinstatement

pattern seen in Mexico's 31 December 2025 canasta básica decree (filed separately) — countries reinstating import protection on basic foodstuffs in the same week, suggesting a broader end-2025 wave of food-tariff reimposition independent of any coordinated policy.

Open questions

• Whether Iraq's domestic oxygen and dairy processing capacity can actually

absorb import substitution at the 120-day timeline, or whether the duties will be delayed/exempted the way several prior Iraqi additional-duty decrees have seen ad-hoc carve-outs.

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

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