Deal with Iran relaxes trade embargo to allow carpets, airplane parts

While Tuesday’s landmark deal on Iran’s nuclear program won’t lift America’s trade embargo on Iran, there will be a few exceptions for food, carpets and airplane parts.

{mosads}Senior administration officials confirmed the slight change during a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, just hours after international negotiators announced the agreement to roll back international sanctions on Iran in exchange for concessions on its nuclear program.

American individuals, as well as American businesses and banks, will still be “generally prohibited from all dealings with Iranian companies,” outside of those few exceptions.

“The only adjustment we will make to those sanctions at the implementation date will be to allow the import of food and carpets from Iran and the export of civilian aircraft and parts to Iran, which has one of the worst airline safety records in the world,” a senior administration official said. 

Trade embargoes have vastly limited the availability of Western aircrafts and parts. That’s led Iran’s commercial air fleet to decline and mostly include “vintage” airplanes, according to a report in Wired. A New York Times article from 2012 adds that Iranian plane crashes are responsible for the death of more than 1,700 passengers and crew members.

And that was before a 2014 crash killed 39.

The decision could also be a boon to the Persian carpet market, which Iranian state television says includes about 1.2 million weavers. 

Persian rugs are popular products that brought in $560 million in exports in 2012, according to a report from the British news organization The Independent.

But underscoring the at-times hostile relationship between the U.S. and Iran, The Independent report about the Persian rugs was written by Jason Rezaian, an American-Iranian journalist currently imprisoned in Iran. Rezaian continues to be held as he faces trial for espionage after he was arrested while working for The Washington Post.