Big Bad Corn
Supply and Demand
by Sarah Wenger
Learn Stuff
If
you’ve ever creeped your way through a corn maze at Halloween,
you know how it can grab ahold of your imagination, turning benign
stalks into monsters and discarded cobs into severed limbs. It’s
just a trick of the light – but take a look at the ways that
the U.S. uses corn, and you’ll see that a holiday thrill isn’t
the scariest thing about this product. It was first subsidized in
the late ‘70s as a fossil fuel alternative, but it’s turned
out to be inefficient source of fuel. Not only that, ethanol from
corn actually increases the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at
a higher rate than gasoline. Yet, the U.S. pays $10 to $30 billion
dollars each years in farm subsidies to raise even more of it, with
no clear benefit to consumers. So every time you eat a pound of
corn products – which statistics say you will do 37 times over
this year alone – remember this graphic, which was created so
you can learn stuff about the effects of corn, America’s biggest
agricultural product.
September
6, 2012
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