Two excellent paragraphs from Adam Sheingate's review of The End of Food:How did we get here? The answer, in a kernel, is cheap corn. Since World War II, synthetic fertilizers and hybrid seeds have resulted in massive increases in agricultural productivity. Over the last 60 years or so, there has been a four-fold increase in corn production and yields. At 13 billion bushels, the 2007 corn crop was the largest in U.S. history. Over the same period, the real (inflation-adjusted) price of corn has dropped by two-thirds. Even with the ethanol-fueled boom in commodities this year, the price of corn is about where it was in real terms in the mid-1990s, the last time prices spiked, and it is well below the historic highs seen during the tight commodity markets of the 1970s.Cheap corn makes for cheap high-fructose corn syrup, an ingredient in everything from soda to bread and a likely culprit in the rising rates of obesity in this country. Cheap corn also makes cheap feed for livestock, and thus cheap meat produced on massive feedlots. These industrial feeding operations are a breeding ground for E. coli, which can spread quickly through the highly concentrated meat-processing industry. And cheap corn means narrow profit margins, prompting farmers to plant more acres, forgo crop rotation, and apply heavier applications of fertilizer and chemicals that deplete the soil of nutrients and damage our rivers and oceans. In other words, cheap corn is not really cheap at all. It is just that many of the costs of cheap corn have been externalized in the form of rising health care costs and environmental degradation.
