Halfway down Mexico's Baja California peninsula is a dazzling sight; the world's largest sea-salt plant, owned jointly by the Mexican government and Mitsubishi Corporation, Japan's largest trading house. Salt flats covering an area a third the size of Tokyo stretch as far as the eye can see, producing about half of Japan's salt imports. Its advocates say the raw material has a rare quality. The white crystals, dried by the sun, are drawn from seawater in an inlet of the Pacific coast so pristine that grey whales travel from the Arctic to breed there. Yet for all its allure, the place is immersed in a bitter dispute over how to value the world's only edible rock. For millennia, salt has been among the world's most sought-after commodities. Roman soldiers, it is said, were sometimes paid in it. Animals trampled the outlines of today's roads looking for saltlicks. Though salt has as many as 14,000 industrial uses, from making detergents to de-icing roads, it is so cheap to make that the cost of getting it to market may be more than the cost of producing it. Yet, Mitsubishi, which for almost 40 years has had exclusive rights to buy the Mexican salt and sell it around the world, has at times acquired it at below even its paltry production cost.
展开▼
