There is some weird thing about it in my country, pre-war,'Yerba mate becomes a major import commodity

On 8 December 2019, the Central Bank of Syria included mate in the list of basic commodities supported for import. This underlines its significance in Syria as Syria is considered the world’s largest mate importer.

Syria received 34.5 thousand tons of mate from Argentina in 2018, according to the National Institution of Argentine Yerba Mate (INYM), from which Syria imports 99.7 percent of its mate annually.

Those figures were “historical” in Argentina, according to the Buenos Aires Times, Argentina’s only English-language newspaper.