Food prices up- is corn the solution?

Hey all! I bet you thought I had forgotten about this blog. Nope, I just didn't have anything that I thought was post-worthy for a few weeks. However this story is well worth all our consideration.

We've talked a lot on this blog about how the food in this country is making us Americans fat. We can't help that perspective- it's been drilled into us for the past few years in various forms (books, magazine articles, and most recently segments of televised news). We also know that a large portion of our food comes from other countries (Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, etc.) What we haven't considered is the food that we, as a nation, export to the rest of the world, and how it effects them.

This link takes you to the EPA's agriculture webpage that lists the major agricultural crops for the year 2000. Corn, soybeans, wheat and rice were all exported then, and probably are now. Surprisingly, we grow and export roughly 50% of the world's soybeans. Additionally we are responsible for 25% of the world's export market for wheat, 18% for rice, and we supply corn to 80% the world's livestock, fish and poultry productions for feed (domestic and foreign combined). I'll assume that the totals for the 2010 census are still being tallied, but I think it's fair to guess that these amounts haven't changed much in the past decade.

This link takes you to a recently published article (thank you BBC) about food prices around the world having increased by 36% in the past year. The World Bank estimates that 44 million people around the world have been "pushed into poverty" by these price increases. Citing the "problems" in the Middle East and North Africa as the driving force behind the increases the World Bank is urging food producing countries ease export controls and divert production away from biofuels production "when food prices exceed certain limits".

Wheat and soybeans went up 69% and 36% respectively. Now guess which crop has increased in cost the most in the past year. Give up? Corn.

Corn: that mutated grass which appears on our grocery shelves in multitude of disguises; the crop that our government still pays a subsidy for so it's overproduced; the crop with the 10 billion bushel harvest in 2000, amounting to just about 43% of the world's total; the crop that gets fed to the animals on factory farms, and in turn to us; the crop we love to hate, went up 76% in cost this past year alone.

Here's an idea: how about we stop feeding corn to animals that were never meant to eat it (i.e. fish, cattle, and poultry), and plant the kind that people can eat instead, and keep the rest of the people in the world from starving? Maybe we can admit that the super pollution of both water and atmosphere by factory farms isn't worth eating the meat that comes out of it. How about, while we're at it, we stop finding new and different ways to trick ourselves into eating corn super- processed. Maybe that way we can avoid this epidemic of impending starvation around the world, and all of us can get back to eating food that will keep us healthy.

If anyone wants me, I'm at the farmer's market.