It’s a belated wake-up call to our country’s highly subsidized and bloated Big Corn industry. It’s mind-boggling, but true: Despite the massive corn production in the U.S., we are now importing corn from other countries to meet the demand for organic produce, Bloomberg News reported last week. The reason? About 90 percent of U.S. corn and soy is bioengineered, automatically making it ineligible for the organic label, Bloomberg reported.
It’s a very expensive: American farm subsidies cost taxpayers $20 billion a year, The Economist reported, with most of the money going to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soybeans in states such as Iowa.
It’s long been known that most of the corn grown in the U.S. isn’t consumed by humans. The majority of it becomes livestock feed, (despite the fact that cows can’t digest it); ethanol production comes in second, and production of starch, corn oil and corn sweeteners are not far behind.
Hence the demand for organic corn. Most of which is coming from Romania, while sales of soybeans from India are also booming, according to an analysis of U.S. trade data released by the Organic Trade Association and Penn State University, Bloomberg reported. Romanian corn rose to $11.6 million in 2014 from $545,000 the year before. Soybean imports from India more than doubled to $73.8 million. (China comes in second of organic soybeans exports to the U.S. after Romania. We get the rest of the organic corn from Turkey, the Netherlands and Canada.)
The idea of the U.S. importing corn is so crazy that even the federal government had to notice. So last week U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said the government will boost support for production of organic crops and produce this year to meet growing consumer demand and boost rural incomes.
Better late than never; however, it will only make sense if subsidies are decreased or stopped for crops that have consumed the bulk of the annual $20 billion: Corn, wheat, cotton, rice and soybeans. This would end the practice of giving ever more money to already rich farmers, who may or may not actually be growing anything, and might not even be alive.
Meanwhile, living, breathing organic farmers would get help to meet the demand for whatever crops they grow, including corn. The organic sector’s average annual growth of about 10 percent is triple that of overall food sales, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture. To actually meet demand, and take action toward a reasonable federal budget, it’s not enough to just help organic farmers. The billions and billions in subsidies to the big five crops must end.
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