Is Big Corn responsible for death and destruction?

Posted by Marc Hodak on April 14, 2008 under Unintended consequences | Comments are off for this article

By Big Corn, I mean U.S. policy supporting corn growers.

By “policy,” I mean the accumulated, incoherent hodgepodge of subsidies and mandates around growing and selling corn.

If corn policy were debated in an open and thoughtful manner…well, that’s just crazy talk when referring to Congress. But if it were possible, one doubts it would look anything like what we have now, because it would be clear that what we have now creates incentives for environmental destruction and mass starvation, not to mention higher domestic prices, in exchange for financial appeasement of certain special interests.

Corn subsidies significantly contribute to accelerating the burning of the Amazonian rainforest.

“American taxpayers are spending $11 billion a year to subsidize corn producers—and this is having some surprising global consequences,” said Laurance. “Amazon fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months, especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil. Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef prices.”

So, where were the environmentalists when these subsidies were being announced? Oh yea, most of them don’t believe in economics.

Ethanol mandates promote rising food prices in the U.S. and hunger in the third world.

Our policy makers currently don’t foresee these consequences, partly because they result from interaction among disparate laws that individually make sense to their supporters, and partly from a lack of imagination or concern about secondary consequences of government intervention in the marketplace.

And, after all, why should they care if the worst effects are unlikely to impact their own voters, or at least the ones who write campaign checks?