THE scale of deepening poverty in Iran was highlighted by a hand-written advertisement, offering the sale of a human liver, posted on a shop window in the country’s western Kermanshah province today. 

As the country’s economic crisis leaves Iranian families struggling to survive, Iran News Wire posted a picture of the advert online, which read: “Liver for sale. B+ blood type.”

The state-run Arman daily newspaper said in an article last October: ”Selling kidneys in our country is not a new phenomenon and has been going on for about two decades.”

It reported that a channel, with around 140,000 members, on messaging service Telegram was publishing adverts selling kidneys and livers.

“Each liver is two billion rials (£34,000) and each kidney at one to 1.5 billion rials (£20,000-£25,000), depending on the age of the individual and blood type,” it said. 

The sale of body organs has been described as “an untold tragedy” and the consequence of a deepening economic crisis and spiralling inflation, which has seen many Iranians unable to afford basic food items, including bread.

Iran is the only country in the world that offers its citizens a legal way to sell their kidneys, though not their liver, with a government foundation matching up registered buyers and sellers with a fixed price per organ.

More than 30,000 kidney transplants are believed to have been carried out using this scheme since 1993. 

But the waiting list can be long and Iranians are posting adverts on shop windows and walls offering a way to circumvent the national programme.

The economic situation has also seen a new spike in protests and strikes across the country in anger over the clerical regime’s handling of the economic crisis, which has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and crippling US sanctions.

In Ahvaz, scores of water and sewage workers gathered outside the governor’s office today to demand three months’ worth of unpaid wages.

Farmers went on strike in Hasht Bandi, Hormozgan province, on Sunday, saying that they have been forced into bankruptcy, accusing the government of having abandoning them.

On Monday workers from Mahshahr’s petrochemical factory rallied in front of the city governor’s office, protesting against a delay in payment of their wages, with a banner saying: “Listen to the workers’ demands. We can’t feed our families.”

But the government has instead waged a violent clampdown, with scores of cross-border traders killed in Sistan and Baluchestan Province during protests at the end of last month.

According to human rights groups, at least 204 Iranian citizens were directly or indirectly killed or wounded by Iran’s state security forces in 2020.