Answering my own question

A couple days ago I asked if there was a real world example of the cobalt - alchemy - tritanium effect that we could look at. As it turns out, there is a near perfect example available to us and it's not even far away from us.

Cobalt - Alchemy - Tritanium = Corn - Ethanol - Petroleum

In a bid to drive gas prices down, Ethanol was introduced. This turned corn into car fuel (technically, it replaced part of the petroleum with Ethanol but did not fully wipeout gasoline as an input... same as Technetium).

The affect of this was essentially a tax on people who consume a lot of corn. This drove up corn based sugar products in the US some, but food makers quickly moved back to real sugar cane (and advertised it!!). But our neighbors to the south could not do that so readily. Corn is a huge part of the traditional Mexican diet and dietary needs (unlike specific, easily substitutable ingredients) are difficult to change.

As a result, Ethanol was a secret tax (wrong word in a technical sense but sufficient for our purposes) on Mexico. So Mexico is the Gallente of Earth (at least for now).