Restaurant owners have never given so much time and attention to bargain shopping for limes. While the price has dropped a bit from its peak a couple weeks ago of $139 for a 40-pound box of limes, bartenders around the country are reporting that the same boxes now go for around $115 apiece. Those boxes hold 110 limes and used to cost around $40 before the shortage began.
Meanwhile, the average price of a single lime for the week ending May 2 was 54 cents, compared with 30 cents a year ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
One of the reasons the shortage has had such a dramatic impact on price is that about 98 percent of limes consumed in the U.S. come from just one country: Mexico. As NPR correspondent Carrie Kahn, several factors are straining production there. Heavy rains late last year in the states of Michoacan, Guerrero and Veracruz hurt the crop. And in Colima, a big lime-producing state, a bacterium, known as citrus greening disease, is infecting trees.
But as Kahn notes, there's also a sinister wrinkle to the lime shortage: Criminal gangs are adding to the high prices by stealing from orchards and hijacking truck shipments bound for the U.S. Truck companies have had to add security to the trucks, which has raised the price of the fruit, too.
Purdue horticulture professor Bruce Bordelon Indiana Public Media comments that the U.S. is now paying the price for its nearly exclusive dependence on Mexican limes.
"You have some bad weather, you have some problems, even just poor fruit because of rainfall during flowering — anything like that could create a big problem," says Bordelon. "And then in one year, you've depressed supply because it's all coming from one region."
Source: www.npr.org