Iraq 2025-26 fiscal-driven customs tariff reform

A cluster of Iraqi Council of Ministers and General Customs Authority actions from August-December 2025 that raise import duties across paper/packaging, food, industrial-gas, vehicle and luxury-goods lines — additional duties on paper napkins (75%) and polystyrene food containers (30%, announced 10 August), a 25% duty on imported tomato paste (announced 13 November), Cabinet Decision No. 957's full tariff-schedule rebracketing (0.5%-30%, hitting hybrid/electric vehicles and gold at 15%, late December), and targeted additional-duty decrees on medical/industrial oxygen and dairy imports (also late December). Distinct from em-resource-upstream-capture (mineral-export bans aimed at forcing domestic processing) and from food-security-export-controls (agricultural self-sufficiency logic): this is straightforwardly fiscal — a revenue-and-import-substitution push by a government under budget pressure, using both product-specific decrees and a comprehensive tariff-schedule rewrite, all invoking Law No. 11 of 2011's domestic-product-protection authority.