But corn, from which tortillas are made, is in high demand. In the rest of North America endless truckloads of corn are making the journey each summer and fall to ethanol plants, or, in smaller quantities, to plastics plants using corn products as a feedstock (primary ingredient) for plastics. A highly touted plastic substitute called polylactide, which is used for some water bottles, is made from corn.

Eighty per cent of Mexico’s corn today comes from the U.S.A. The result? Tortilla prices have gone up 400 per cent in Mexico since last fall. For the tens of millions of poor Mexicans, this is catastrophic. The self-employed poor have no unions; indeed, from what I’ve seen in Mexico City, they can often be the very people who make a living off the taco and burrito stands, and who have to pass on the higher prices, or operate at a loss. When you live a hair above the edge of destitution, loss-leading is not an option.

Some people in Canada and the U.S. see ethanol as an absolute necessity for reducing greenhouse gases. There is a less heard lobby that points out that having thousands of trucks brining the corn to a big, power-guzzling ethanol plant reduces emissions only minimally, or even adds to them. The oil and gas industry, for all its manipulation of politicians, markets and entire segments of the economy, still delivers a less energy-consuming source of energy. (That sentence does not contain a typo).

The answer? I don’t have one, no does anyone else. So many issues today require a new way of managing them, and we are slow to believe this. Even slower, it seems, to grasp that they need addressing. The Homeland Security theorists are already considering what to do on the day Latino terrorists takes over from Al-Qaeda. Planning armed resistance to an armed resistance, though, doesn’t appear to work too well, going by past experience.

And over the price of tortillas...?