Mexican Farmers Blame Weather for High Lime Prices Joshua Partlow - The Washington Post
go to original May 7, 2014

Thousands of restaurateurs from coast to coast who have fallen victim to the Great Green Citrus Crisis of 2014. The price of a lime has skyrocketed in recent weeks, quadrupling or, in some areas, going even higher. (Scott Luhrs/AP)

MEXICO CITY — It’s been a tough spring for Cinco de Mayo fans and the bars that keep them plied with tart margaritas, as the Great Lime Shortage of 2014 has been threatening to break-up the party.

Cocktail prices spiked, bars passed off lemons as substitutes, and a 40-pound carton of limes shot past $100 in the United States, four times the normal price.

Nearly all the limes thumbed down Corona bottles come from Mexico, which accounts for a half-million tons of U.S. imports. And there have been a lot of theories about what caused the unusual prices, including that extortion by drug cartels in the lime-growing state of Michoacan was being passed on to customers north of the border.

But Mexican lime-growers attribute the high prices to something more mundane: bad weather. Unusually heavy rains last winter led to an outbreak of a fungus that destroyed many lime trees and reduced the national supply.

“It’s climate change,” said Enrique Saavedra, director general of B&S Grupo Expertador, a lime exporter in Veracruz, the leading Mexican state for sending limes to America. “People speculate that it had something to do with security in Michoacan, but it wasn’t that.”

Read the rest at The Monitor

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