About Iranian Agriculture News Agency

Iranian Agriculture News Agency

The Iranian Agriculture News Agency, known by the acronym IANA, is an official Iranian news agency devoted entirely to agriculture, food and rural affairs. Based in Tehran and publishing at iana.ir in Persian, with an English version produced for readers abroad, it began work in May 2004 with a brief that no general Iranian agency held: to cover agricultural issues around the world, to introduce Iran's own agriculture to the world, and to serve the farmers, specialists and policymakers who make up the country's farm sector. More than two decades later the agency is still publishing daily, through a network of specialist desks in Tehran and provincial correspondents whose reports — datelined from provinces such as Fars — fill its site with harvest, livestock, fisheries, irrigation and food-industry news. IANA is one of the clearest examples of the specialist-agency model that developed in Iran in the 2000s, in which a single sector of national life acquired a dedicated wire of its own.

Founding in May 2004 and founding mission

IANA's start dates back to May 2004. Its founding goals, as the agency itself set them out, were to carry out specialised activity on agriculture and rural development; to help Iran's national information network develop in the agriculture sector; to provide information for the sector's beneficiaries and specialists; to take its place alongside other written and electronic media; to offer proposed solutions to the sector's problems; and to establish a dynamic and productive connection with public opinion inside and outside Iran, so as to advance agricultural policy at both the macro and the micro level. The agency also set itself the task of reflecting the capacities of the agriculture sector and its sub-sectors, particularly in social affairs, in non-governmental organisations and in the culture of the village. It described its own method as predictive and analytic — a news agency expected not only to report the farm sector but to analyse it and to anticipate its direction. That combination of reporting, analysis and advocacy for a single industry, stated at the moment of founding, has remained the clearest description of what IANA is for.

A specialist agency within Iran's media system

IANA belongs to the generation of Iranian news agencies created or expanded in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when ministries, universities and public bodies established their own wires alongside the official Islamic Republic News Agency and the large general agencies. Reference lists of Iran's notable news agencies place IANA among the country's recognised agencies, alongside the Iran Book News Agency, the petro-energy service Shana and other single-sector wires. The Young Journalists Club, in a 2023 survey of Iran's official news agencies, likewise counted IANA among the country's official agency landscape. At the same time, outside assessors have noted how little public documentation exists about the ownership and funding of agencies of this type: the State Media Monitor's 2025/26 review grouped IANA with several other Iranian outlets it considered potentially state-linked but for which it found insufficient public-domain documentation to support a formal classification, and it said it continued to monitor them. IANA is therefore best described as it describes itself — an official, specialist agency for the agriculture sector — with the detailed corporate record that would settle its exact institutional status not publicly available.

News groups and desks

The agency's Tehran newsroom was organised into eight news groups plus a technical and support group, supervised by nine desk editors who managed the groups beneath them and edited and published the news, reports, articles and critiques appearing on the website. The groups were: Agriculture, covering crop production and farming itself; Economy, covering the markets, prices, trade and finance that surround the farm sector; Rural Development and Industries, covering the development of villages and the processing and food industries built on farm output; Research and Study, covering agricultural science and the research institutes of the sector; International, covering agriculture in other countries and Iran's place in world food trade; Non-Government Organizations, covering the associations, cooperatives and producer bodies of rural Iran; Parliament, covering the Majlis, its agriculture commission and the legislation affecting the sector; Culture and Art, covering the cultural life of rural communities; and Picture, the photographic desk supplying images for the other groups. The structure is revealing: a farm agency that maintains its own parliament desk and its own culture desk understood its subject not as a narrow commodity beat but as a whole rural society, from the field to the legislature.

Journalists and management

Forty-nine journalists worked at IANA in the newsroom structure described above, including the nine desk editors who controlled the groups. The managing director named in the agency's reference listings is Kazem Shokri. The agency's web presence also preserves a record of the people who built it. The English version of IANA's website was designed, programmed and launched by Aref Mohammadzadeh, who served as the agency's director of international affairs and secretary of its international desk before becoming a director of the agency. The later Persian version of the site was designed and launched by Moj Network Developer ICT Co., Ltd., a company under Mohammadzadeh's management and control. That an agriculture wire maintained a dedicated international desk, an English website and an in-house programme of web development underlines the second half of its founding mission: IANA was built not only to inform Iranian farmers but to present Iranian agriculture to an audience outside the country.

Coverage: from the field to the food industry

The agency's present-day output, visible on iana.ir, shows the breadth its desk structure promised. Provincial desks file under their province's name — reports from Fars province, for example, carry the Fars–IANA dateline and cover the daily administration of farming at county level: the distribution of standard fertiliser and the multi-layer supervision of the fertiliser supply chain, the licensing of a light-livestock industrial unit, the start of the rain-fed fig harvest across some 700 hectares of orchards at Jahrom, the start of the walnut harvest at Neyriz, the opening of a 30,000-bird poultry unit, and the signing of documents settling the status of undocumented agricultural land. Alongside the provincial service, a dedicated industry service covers the food economy beyond the farm gate — the distribution industry and its fuel costs, fisheries enterprises that combined production with tourism at Shout in the Maku free zone, and the food and pharmaceutical supply chain, where IANA reported the industry's own account of its role in keeping food supply stable in a crisis. The pattern is consistent: IANA reports the agriculture sector from inside, through its officials, its companies and its provincial offices, story by story and county by county.

IANA as a source for researchers and policymakers

Because it reports the sector continuously and in detail, IANA has become a source that outside researchers reach for when they need the Iranian farm economy's own account of itself. The United States Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, in its study of developments in Iran's agriculture sector and the prospects for American trade, cited IANA's Persian reporting — including its 2015 report that chemical fertiliser use in Iran had fallen to one-third of its former level. A study of Iran's World Trade Organization accession published in the journal Iranian Studies cited IANA's May 2012 report on the agriculture sector's budget allocation, and the Tehran-based investment house Turquoise Partners carried the same IANA reporting in its Iran Investment Monthly. These citations, spread across American government research, British-based scholarship and Iranian financial analysis, show the agency performing exactly the bridging role its founders described: carrying the Iranian agriculture sector's news to beneficiaries and specialists, and introducing that sector to readers abroad who would otherwise have no direct access to it.

Relationship to the agriculture administration

IANA's beat is the world administered by Iran's Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, the government body formed in 2001 by the merger of the agriculture ministry with the Jihad of Construction, and responsible for oversight of agriculture across Iran. The agency's parliament desk follows the ministry's legislation; its provincial reports are built around the ministry's provincial organisations and their county-level agriculture management offices, whose directors are the named sources in a large share of its stories; and its research desk follows the ministry's research and education apparatus. Questions on public discussion forums have described IANA as the agriculture ministry's own official news agency, and its output is consistent with that position — it announces, explains and defends the sector's official programmes. At the same time, as the State Media Monitor noted, the formal documentation of its ownership and funding is not in the public domain, so this profile records the relationship as one of function and beat rather than of a published corporate charter.

Languages, website and audiences

IANA publishes first in Persian, the working language of Iranian farming, and maintains an English version of its website aimed at the foreign reader named in its mission. Its official listings historically carried four web addresses — Persian and English sites with alternates — reflecting the agency's early investment in its web presence under its international desk. Its audiences are correspondingly layered: farmers and rural producers reading for practical news of inputs, licences, water and harvests; specialists and researchers in the agriculture research system; traders and food-industry managers following the economy desk; parliamentarians and officials followed by, and reading, the parliament desk; and foreign analysts, for whom the English service and the agency's citable Persian reporting provide a window into a sector that sanctions and language would otherwise keep closed. Few Iranian agencies serve so defined a professional readership, and IANA's longevity rests on that definition.

Status and continuity

Reports over the years of mergers among Iranian state news agencies have sometimes been extended to the specialist wires, and in 2023 the culture minister's plan to merge the culture ministry's own agencies into IRNA was widely reported. That plan concerned the agencies of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and whatever its fate, IANA's own record is one of continuity rather than dissolution: the agency that began in May 2004 was still filing daily provincial and industry news from iana.ir in the mid-2020s, with its provincial desks active and its industry service carrying the food economy's news. For a directory of Iranian media, IANA therefore stands as an active, official, single-sector news agency — the farm wire of a country in which agriculture, water and food security are permanent front-page questions, and in which a dedicated agency has spent more than twenty years treating them as such.