Rice prices up 35% in SF

It's caused a run on rice in Chinatown:

At the Sun Kau Shing grocery, for example, 50-pound bags of long-grain rice were selling for $32 to $38 on Tuesday. That, customers said, was an increase of about 35 percent over a month ago. It was enough to stop amazed pedestrians in their tracks.

It appears that higher energy costs are part of what's driving the prices up:

Likewise, while California rice farmers have begun planting this year’s crop of half a million acres, the high prices may prove only enough to cover their increased costs of fuel and fertilizer, industry officials say.

“Diesel is up 40 percent, and fertilizer has doubled,” said Tim Johnson, president and chief executive of the California Rice Commission, a trade group in the nation’s second-largest rice-producing state, after Arkansas.

Pretty alarming.