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totally isolated, it has declared its
willingness to join the Arab League, in sharp opposition to
the aspiration of its people, its history, and cultural and
ethnic specificities.
Economically, ranked 146th on
a list of 156 countries analyzed for their performance,
the country’s rate of investment, calculated on the basis of
economic output, has fallen from 62.7% in 1977 to 28% in 2001;
since the 70s, despite 100% increase in oil revenues, average
inflation rate has doubled, growth rate has plummeted by 60%,
while unemployment has tripled;from
1997 to 2002, the [official] unemployment rate has grown from
9.1% of the active population to 14.7%,
a devastating trend which, if continued, would bring about an
army of nearly 8 million unemployed by the end of a hypothetic
fifth economic plan.
Meanwhile, some 6 million Iranians live below the poverty line
and an estimated 18 million are in the low income category.
Environmentally,
Iranian forests are disappearing at a rate of 50 m2 per
second, causing a soil erosion rate of 32 tons per second;
Desert areas in Iran are expanding by the rate of 300 meters
per second; In the 1984- 85 period only, 57 million hectares
of soil has been eroded;
At this pace, if unmatched, the country’s forests, along
with many of the country’s endemic floral and animal spices
of the Zagros and Elborz mountains, would be wiped out by 2018.
On account of a report by NASA,
“in one of the greatest ecological disasters of our time”,
ancient marshlands of Mesopotamia are being systematically
converted to dry salt flats as a result of human mismanagement
of the region’s water resources. In the 90s, wetlands that
once covered as much as 20,000 km2 in parts of Iraq and Iran
have been reduced to a small fraction of their original size.
According to the country’s Head of the Organization of
Planning and Management, internal energy consumption amounts
to 20 billion $US a year. Energy and transportation
mismanagement have turned the country, OPEC’s second oil
producer, into a net importer of gasoline for 1.5 billion $US
a year.
Lowest hypothesis puts at 43000 tons/year the amount of dangerous
industrial and medical waste produced in Tehran alone and
disposed
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