Iran's stone mines in danger of closure
Chairman of Markazi Province Miners Association: If the situation continues like this and the officials do not take the necessary measures to provide spare parts for machinery, no doubt all mines in Iran will be closed one after another and we will face a lot of unemployed people.
Hossein Pourhassani, head of the Miners' Association of Markazi Province, in an exclusive interview with Iran's Stone News Agency said: "Many of the machines and machinery in Iran's mines are worn out and need to be repaired continuously. At the moment, with the sanctions and the price of the dollar, the price of these parts has gone up, and worse, these parts are not available in the market and in no way can we get them.
"Work in the mine is heavily dependent on machinery and without them there is no way to work in the mine if the situation goes the same way and the authorities do not take the necessary steps to make machinery spare parts available," he added. The mines of Iran will be closed one after another and we will be faced with many unemployed people.
"Obviously no miner wants to shut down his mine and lose his colleagues, but in this situation there is no choice but to close the mine," he said. Many of the machines we use in the mine are foreign and have no domestic production at all. If these machines were domestically produced we would have used domestic production but there is no domestic production and we have to use production. We are foreigners.
He said many of the consumables of stone mills also do not have domestic production and we have to import them from abroad. In some cases, domestic production is also of poor quality and efforts should be made to increase the quality of these products and make them applicable to factories.
"We demand from the Honorable Government to provide the necessary platforms for the import of mining machinery parts that do not have a similar interior and the import of consumables for non-similar stone industries as soon as possible if the situation goes unchecked," he said. Iran's mines will be closed one after another.
