Ethanol’s empty promises

American farmers are absurdly proficient at growing corn. Last year’s crop covered 82 million acres and yielded more than 11 billion bushels worth $23 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making it the nation’s top farm commodity.

And almost none of that corn was food. Not technically, anyway, even though a lot of it ended up in American bellies. This helps explain the enthusiasm among lawmakers and lobbyists for investment in alternative fuels such as ethanol, which received a boost in President Bush’s State of the Union speech and in the 2007 budget he unveiled recently.

Thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, hybridization and the crop’s suitability for large-scale mechanized agriculture, corn production in the United States long ago outstripped consumer demand. For a while, the surplus was hidden in livestock, as beef and pork producers shifted from grass and other home-grown food sources to cheap and fattening corn.

That wasn’t enough to absorb the surplus, so American farmers sent their corn abroad, often undercutting prices in the receiving countries and bankrupting less-well-capitalized growers there. Even exports, however, proved inadequate to absorb the U.S. corn crop. So, after failing to sequester the surplus in animals and foreigners, the food industry found another place to hide it: inside the bodies of Americans themselves.

Albuquerque Tribune