I want to talk a little bit about corn. Corn, as an example, illustrates pretty perfectly the economic relationship between the United States of America and Mexico. It's kind of a long story, though, so I'm going to breaking this up over the next few days. Here we go.
Let's start at home. Way back in the early 1900s, the federal government in the States figured out that it wasn't good for business when either one of two things happened: boom crops or bust crops. Booms mean it's a good year for growing, and the supply is huge, but prices drop and farmers end up not so happy when they can't pay their bills. Busts mean that very little gets produced, meaning demand overwhelms supply, prices soar, and consumers get pretty whiny. The Government had a pretty good solution, they figured. They started paying farmers not to grow corn. That's right. Not to grow it. Since corn stores really well, the excess product from a boom year can be stored for a bust year instead of flooding the market; the price of corn stays stable from year to year. In order to thank the farmers for their cooperation, they get paid to sit on their duffs (kind of) at the times when there's lots of extra corn sitting around. Everyone wins, right? Farmers keep farming, earning a steady living, and our tortillas stay the same price--oops! We don't eat tortillas. I meant our... corn bread?
Then came World War II, and chemical companies were having a grand old time of producing explosives to use against the bad guys. But when the War was over, they had to find another way to make money. That's when somebody figured out that nitrogen (something these chemical companies had a lot of lying around) increases the output of things like corn and tomatoes, and we got what we refer to as the Green Revolution, and is nothing at all like the explosion of "green" products on the market today. The Green Revolution of the 1940s-70s boils down to this: unbelievably high production of agricultural products with very low labor costs. Some people started being a little less happy at this point, because fewer farm workers were necessary, and a couple small farmers had to find something else to do. But those are little people with little voices, so... shhh...
Next in our time line is the 1970s, and a nasty word that starts with an "r." Yep. Recession. As a part of that recession, food prices increased drastically as farmers struggled to pay off their loans. The Government Big Guys had another good idea, encouraged farmers to grow "fencerow to fencerow," and started handing out subsidies to help increase production. Only problem was, you only get subsidies if you're producing on a very large scale. So small farms keep going out of business, or consolidating into one big farm, and agriculture becomes a big-business thing instead of a neighborhood thing. By this point, 42% of the world's corn was already being produced in the States. The exported corn can be sold at 20% less than the actual production cost, thanks to our huge subsidies.
Well, that's the main thrust of the history of corn in the States. Tomorrow I'll be talking about Mexican corn. Yum!
Many thanks to Susanna at BorderLinks for the statistics listed here, and for her work with the Sustainable Foods project there.
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