from the associated press:
It’s a similar story for U.S. beef producers, who now spend a whopping 60-70 percent of their production costs on animal feed and are seeing that number rise daily as corn prices hover near an unprecedented $8 a bushel, up from about $4 a year ago.
(it’s both fascinating and horrifying in the same way that “super size me” and “an inconvenient truth” were) and it’s helped me to understand the subtext behind why we’ve historically had these huge surpluses of grain, why the small farmers are going out of business, and why processed foods are so evil and making americans obese: the giant pile of corn.
the giant pile of corn (which is different from the giant pool of money, which if you haven’t listened to it, is brilliantly explained by this american life and shows how the housing crunch in america turned into a huge international credit crisis. highly recommended) is the huge surplus of grain produced by our current incredibly productive variant of maize that is propped up by cheap petroleum used for fertilizer by industrial farming. this has led to curious side effects like the flood of both processed foods and zillions of crazy corn by-products in said processed foods, and in turn rise of things like american obesity and type II diabetes from the spread of more corn by-products like high-fructose corn syrup. yet this has all been predicated by the cheap petroleum and in turn corn, which has been dropping from $2 a bushel down to $1.25 a bushel in recent years. yet now with corn up to $8 a bushel, you wonder how this will ripple through the industry. certainly our food chain built on unnaturally grain-fed beef is already seeing the effects, but how much further could this fundamentally change how our society feeds itself? could this turn people back to grass-fed cattle and poultry? local more sustainable farming and shopping? or is this just the first step towards soylent green?
Corn’s prices were already rising before the floods, driven up 80 percent over the past year as developing countries like China and India scramble for grains to feed people and livestock. U.S. production of ethanol, an alternative fuel that can be made with corn, has also pushed prices higher, prompting livestock owners to lobby Washington to roll back ethanol mandates.
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If corn were to rise to $10 a bushel, Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, said recouping costs through higher retail prices may not be possible.
“This is one dollar for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.—a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency—and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs,” he said.
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In the same speech, McCain repeated his opposition to policies that encourage corn-ethanol and said the U.S. should eliminate a tariff on ethanol from Brazil because it hinders free trade.
He said he would provide incentives to automakers to manufacture flex-fuel vehicles that can run on ethanol or gasoline. He said Brazil, which gets about half of its auto fuel from sugar cane ethanol, has shown that a country can change its fuel mix in just a few years.