The two-week ceasefire that halted open fighting in Iran has paradoxically triggered a sharp acceleration in the price of basic commodities, eroding the temporary stability that households had clung to during the hostilities. Within days of the truce, the cost of staples such as rice, poultry, and cooking oil began climbing, in some cases by double-digit percentages, according to reports from Tehran’s bazaars and official trade union sources. The head of the Tehran food wholesalers’ union, Reza Kongari, attributes the surge to the coincidence of the lunar calendar – Ramadan overlapping with the Persian New Year – alongside a depreciating currency and higher transport and production costs. Yet these explanations, offered with the familiar official insistence that supply chains remain unbroken, do little to mask a deeper structural crisis that predates the current conflict and now threatens to define its aftermath.

Viewed from Tehran, the immediate trigger is the government’s decision, taken five months ago, to abolish the preferential exchange rate of 28,500 tomans per dollar for a range of essential imports. In its place, the state introduced an electronic food coupon – the kālābarq – worth one million tomans per eligible household. But as figures published this week show, the cost of the basket of goods covered by the coupon has risen from around 2.18 million tomans to 3.78 million tomans over that period, leaving a gap of nearly 2.8 million tomans that families must cover from dwindling incomes. The coupon itself has remained frozen at its original value, a policy choice that analysts in London describe as a recipe for social strain: it insulates the state from fiscal pressure at the expense of purchasing power.

The human toll is visible in the accounts emerging from cities across the country. Citizens in Sari, Tehran, and Kish report that prices now rise almost hourly, forcing them to sell personal possessions on the online marketplace Divar simply to afford food. Drug shortages have become acute, and the internet-dependent freelance economy – already battered by wartime disruption – is shedding jobs as customers vanish. The newspaper Etemad, in a stark editorial, warns that the economic war that follows a ceasefire may be more dangerous than the military one: inflation on some food items has already touched 100 percent, and the average price of a square metre of housing in Tehran has jumped by more than 70 percent in a matter of weeks.

Forward-looking analysis from within Iran and abroad suggests that without a recalibration of the subsidy system – either by increasing the coupon’s value or by allowing it to float with inflation – the gap between state support and market prices will continue to widen, pushing more households toward destitution. The regime’s ability to maintain social order during Ramadan, when charity and communal meals traditionally mask hardship, will be a critical test. For now, the ceasefire has not brought relief; it has lifted the lid on an economic crisis that the war had only temporarily concealed.