Corn is important because, in this country, corn is everything. Corn is one of our main cash crops in America; we feed it to the cows we eat; we refine it to make a substitute for sugar; corn byproducts are found in toothpaste, paint, and a slew of other items that seem in no way related to corn.
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| Credit to: Osmani, Cagle Cartoons, 4/15/2008 |
So why is corn really important? Agriculture began to be subsidized during the New Deal in the 1930s in order to protect farmers who, in addition to the Great Depression, were also facing the devastation of the Dust Bowl and decades of hard times. Corn became heavily subsidized when the United States economy was on a downward spiral, and because these Depression era subsidies remain intact, current Agricultural policy no longer makes sense in a contemporary context. However, this may be hard to change: equal representation from each state in the senate, in addition to the sizable interests of agriculture in Southern and Midwestern states causes corn to have immense lobbying power in Washington. Taken this way, the problem becomes not the farmer or the crop necessarily- but the system and the American model of democracy.
Outdated agriculture subsidies reward the crop, and not necessarily the farmer. Their purpose was to facilitate the farmer in cheaply producing large quantities of corn, which is exactly what is accomplished. We have a handful of commodity crops that are heavily subsidized in this way, but corn may be the most important. Corn provides cheaper feed for the cattle and dairy industries than it would cost the farmer to produce his own feed. It can also be refined and processed to make an astonishing array of chemicals that pervade our grocery stores. It is therefore becoming the backbone of much of American industry, but this relationship is not a healthy one.
None of this is to say I am anti-corn in any way. I love corn. Corn chowder, corn bread, popcorn. I love it, corn is delicious and incredibly versatile. But has that blessing actually turned into a curse? Is the danger of corn its awesome utility, that has now turned it into a- farmers , forgive me- monster taking over the plains of America? How is America to restore balance?
When I talk about corn as a vacuum for federal subsidies, crop insurance, etc., I am referring to large corporate farms - think Monsanto, Cargill, who effectively monopolize the industry -not the small family farms we all might tend to envision when we think “agriculture.” This romantic image is at odds with reality, where corporate farms take the lion’s share of federally allocated aid. The top ten percent of agribusiness collected just under 75% of the total amount of government subsidies in 2010. These numbers indicate a trend similar to what we observe when we look at wealth distribution across our entire nation. The giants of the industry enjoy the well over the majority of agriculture subsidies, while small scale and family farms are left to struggle to make ends meet.
The incredible surpluses created by this subsidized agriculture industry in America affect not only our own farmers and consumers- it goes beyond our borders to affect world trade and the global food supply. To put this in perspective, think about soda, something we are all familiar with. Americans drink soda which would taste better, be cheaper, and most importantly be healthier, if it had been produced with sugar cane, not the heavily processed and refined sweetener we know as high fructose corn syrup. Because we import little sugar, impoverished Haitian or Jamaican farmers are forced to burn their surplus crop when they find they have little to no market for American consumers. Subsidizing the corporate farms while the working poor of any nation- American or otherwise- go hungry and are forced into debt is unacceptable, and future agricultural policy in America would do well to recognize this.
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| Credit to: Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons, 4/25/2008 |
-H. BOMB
To learn more:
Farm Subsidy Database, "The United States Summary Information," Environmental Working Group, last updated June 2011, http://farm.ewg.org/region.php?fips=00000®name=UnitedStatesFarmSubsidySummary .
Jedediah Purdy & James S. Salzman, "Corn Futures: Consumer politics, health, and climate change," Duke Law School Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 145, 2008, http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1146&context=duke_fs .
Kari Hamerschlag, "Farm Subsidies in California: Skewed Priorities and Gross Inequalities," Environmental Working Group, accessed October 25 2011, http://farm.ewg.org/pdf/california-farm.pdf .
i learned something! good article
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