[BunnySlippers]

The formatting got messed up:

Prices for corn tortillas, a staple of Mexican diet and culture, are soaring south of the border.

Some tortilla prices in Mexico have risen as much as 60 percent, hurting the low-income people who depend on it as their basic food.

Elizabeth Rosas, a 20-year-old office cleaner in Mexico City, was discouraged to find that her usual tortilla shop this week raised the price of its corn tortillas from 8 pesos (73 cents) to 10 pesos (91 cents) a kilogram.

"My family doesn't have the budget to pay more for tortillas," said Rosas, who makes $40 a week and shares a two-bedroom apartment with her husband, five relatives and her newborn son.

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Just why tortillas cost so much remains murky.

Corn prices are spiking in the United States, with crop yields low and demand high. The production of the gasoline additive ethanol has taken off in the past year, consuming millions of bushels of corn.

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Mexico also said it will import 650,000 tons of white corn, mainly from the United States, to help lower tortilla prices.

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Some economists say the culprit could be globalization, as products around the world increasingly are linked in a complex supply chain.

"The price of oil is driving up the price of corn (because of increased ethanol production), which is driving up the price of tortillas," said Peter Navarro, a business professor at UC Irvine. "You push on one thing and another thing moves," added Navarro, the author of "If It's Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks."

He said the U.S. ethanol stampede could be thought of "as a regressive tax on Mexico, because it raises the price of a basic commodity. In economics, we call these general equilibrium effects. Something happens in one market and it ripples through other markets."

[Jaysun]

Nothing can be done about this. Price controls would be disastrous. But it'll level out soon enough. Higher corn prices will motivate more to grow corn which will ultimately cause the price to go down.

[USNBandit]

It's a conspiracy I tell ya! Big Corn is in cahoots with Big Oil!

[Jeff Chandler]

The production of the gasoline additive ethanol has taken off in the past year, consuming millions of bushels of corn.

I don't care, unless it affects the price of bourbon. Then I'm mad!

[RunningJoke]

"It is typical of the intellectual confusion in the environmentalist movement that many of its more extreme activists attack the wicked capitalists and imperialists and related globalization while simultaneously pressurizing governments to implement policies that can only impoverish developing countries -- simply in order to pander to the prejudices of well meaning but ill-informed people in the rich countries or to the "power-seeking" agendas of bureaucrats." --A Poverty of Reason Wilfred Beckerman