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 Business News | January 2007 
Calderon to Fight Soaring Tortilla Prices
 Reuters
| | Mexico's President-elect Felipe Calderon and his wife Margarita Zavala greet journalists in Mexico City. Smart, unpretentious and portrayed as virtuous as a girl scout - Mexico's youthful new first lady Margarita Zavala is becoming a hit in this politically divided country. (Reuters/Henry Romero) |
Mexican President Felipe Calderon vowed on Thursday to tackle the soaring price of tortillas, a corn-based foodstuff that is a dietary staple for millions of the country's poor.
Angry housewives shouted at Calderon at public appearances this week, pleading for him to bring down tortilla prices that have shot up as much as 400 percent in recent months.
"We will take all the measures within reach of the federal government to avoid escalating prices," Calderon said. But he added the government did not fix tortilla prices.
Millions of Mexicans eat a daily dose of tacos, wrapping tortillas around a spectrum of foods from beans and chicken to cow eyeballs.
For many poor families, tortillas are the main source of calories. The minimum wage in Mexico is about $4.50 a day.
Tortilla prices have climbed steeply across Mexico in recent weeks, reaching 30 pesos ($2.72) a kilogram (2.2 pounds) in Durango state, according to La Jornada newspaper, up 400 percent from 6 pesos (54 cents) in November.
"The tortilla has never cost so much in the country's history," said leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost last July's presidential election to Calderon.
Mexico, considered by many archeologists as the birthplace of corn, now imports much of the grain from the United States, where prices rocketed 80 percent to their highest levels in a decade last year because of demand for corn-based ethanol fuel.
Mexican government officials say the recent leap in tortilla prices has as much to do with speculation and hoarding by unscrupulous traders as with high U.S. prices.
The Federal Competition Commission regulatory body will launch a probe into tortilla prices. "The objective of the investigation is to determine whether there is any collusion to fix prices, restrict amounts of the goods or divide markets between competitors," it said.
Mexico lifted price controls on tortillas in the 1990s, and is unable to directly fix the cost of the foodstuff.
Calderon vowed to clamp down on price speculators, hold down the price of some corn flour sold by the government and scour the planet for cheaper grain to import
"I don't care if they have to bring it from thousands of kilometers, what matters is that this is not an argument to raise prices," he said while on tour in Veracruz state.
One of Calderon's main priorities since taking office in December has been to try to convince poor Mexicans he has their interests at heart.
The conservative president's narrow election win sparked months of street protests from supporters of his leftist opponent, who claimed electoral fraud. |
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