Iran: A generation of street kids hustling in Iran and Systematic Poverty

Thousands fall through the cracks and get little help as traditional support systems fray.

Los Angeles Times: TEHRAN —

Atefeh is one of the younger members of Iran's merchant class. Her sales territory is the notorious traffic jams of north Tehran. She moves in on potential clients when the light turns red, pressing her face to car windows, cocking her head to one side and putting on a plaintive face.At 12, she isn't as good at plaintive as some of her younger competitors, two boys who are hawking Koranic inscriptions and balloons just up the street. Sometimes her face looks more furious than sad. But she still can clear 55 cents a day selling her packages of pink-and-red strawberry chewing gum to bored and surly drivers.A decade ago, street children were rare in Iran, with its long traditions of charity for the poor, government aid programs and strong family connections. No more.Nongovernmental organizations estimate that the number of street children in Iran, officially listed at 60,000, has grown in recent years to 200,000 or more. Many of them are the offspring of Afghan refugees. Others come from Iranian families who have slipped, through unemployment, drug addiction or illness, into the populous ranks of the urban poor.Social activists say high unemployment, ballooning inflation and misdirected government subsidies have left many families unable to support themselves without turning to their children to help with earnings. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected two years ago on a pledge to deliver Iran's oil wealth back to the nation's dining tables, has done little so far to improve the lot of Tehran's poorest families."In the early days of the revolution, I remember the slogan was, 'Welfare, food and health for everyone,' " said Bahram Rahimi, director of training at the Children's House of Shoosh, a school in south Tehran that provides part-time instruction to street children too busy working or too poor to attend normal schools.


The Children's House stands in the middle of a commercial block in one of the most crowded districts of Tehran. Inside, its corridors are lined with cheerful, hand-painted murals and its classroom chairs are arranged in haphazard clusters, testimony to a young clientele unaccustomed to sitting still in neat rows.About 55% of the city's street children are offspring of the estimated 1.5 million refugees who have flooded into Iran from Afghanistan in waves over the last 20 years, school officials say, and many of the rest are children of single parents, mixed-nationality families or Gypsies.

Many come from the growing number of families beset by drug addiction as heroin shipments across the Afghan border have multiplied since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.Rahmatollah Sedigh Sarvestani, a sociology professor at the University of Tehran, said the number of drug addicts in Iran, officially listed at 1 million, is more likely closer to 3 million, with the number of users possibly as high as 6 million."We don't have enough job opportunities for people. We are facing, even after the revolution, class differentiation, inequality in income, wealth and power. So there are good reasons to have so many addicts, and every other social deviancy," Sarvestani said. "This is everywhere. Not just here and there. Everywhere."Atefeh, who was afraid to give her last name, is a dark, slight girl who looks much younger than 12. She moved with her family to Tehran from the Caspian Sea region several years ago...

Beside mismangement of Iran's economy and oil infrastructure, one reason for the systematic poverty is that Iran's government has discouraged the formation of an industrial middle class because they don't want to repeat the late Shah's mistake where the middle class had the economic power to turn against him. That would leave 80 percent of the economy essentially in the hands of the state. As a result, there is no solid cadre of business leaders to pressure the government.

Despite its massive oil reserves, the country has very little capacity to produce substances like gasoline and jet fuel. It is estimated Iran's imports in this area are at about $10 billion a year, a figure that may represent up to a third of all imports. As A jacksonian eloquently puts it:

It is a metastable system with a heavy change bias to it. Internal collapse between 2012-19 is certain with current domestic market needs increasing and actual oil field production declining. And like many systems in decay the half-life is very important, because it is usually the inflection point for catastrophe: it is the point where a ship sliding to its side will suddenly capsize. It is the spell of bad weather for a year or two that can change lush cropland into dustbowls.

A point of no return!

Note: Iran - the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, and the fourth largest in the world - possesses 12 percent of the world’s crude, with an estimated 130 billion barrels of recoverable oil.