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Comment by e2le | Hacker News Reader

Why is subsidizing corn a bad thing? Honest question.

The corn monoculture in the United States is so pervasive, we hardly notice it—especially for someone like me that's lived under the regime my entire life (I'm in my mid-30s). It's caused us to use corn in places where other materials may be more optimal—for the environment, our health, and even economically—if it weren't for subsidies.

I know someone who has a severe corn allergy (or reaction of some sort). He has to be careful even purchasing "fresh" non-corn vegetables at the supermarket, as they are often coated with a corn-based preservative.

Reminds me of this thread: Corn is not a food, it's a platform.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/10748100434957967...

If most of the world's practical alternative to US corn is palm oil and other cheap slash and burn crops - abandoning corn won't be good for the environment.

Is that the case, though?

It distorts the market by incentivising corn farming. Want to know why so many US farmers grow corn, lobby for bio ethanol fuel laws, and why an ungodly amount of US food is based on corn and corn byproducts (e.g. high fructose corn syrup)? Corn subsidies.

It sucks because high fructose corn syrup tastes worse than sugar for a lot of people too.

Growing it to feed humans is fine. But that's a tiny sliver of the overall market. Then some if it gets made into HFCS, which is not good. Even more of it gets fed to cows, which is not good (they should be eating grass), and which have (not good) climate impacts of its own. And some of it even gets converted into fuel, which is downright dumb. Basically it's a massively subsidized crop which would never be grown at this scale without tremendous market distortion by the government. (To say nothing of the fact that it destroyed an entire ecosystem in the midwest.)

> And some of it even gets converted into fuel, which is downright dumb

Honest question, why is that dumb? Seems to be that would be the "correct" way of producing fuel, as it's zero-net-carb.

Growing the corn requires fertilizer, which is produced from oil, it requires irrigation and water, and it requires large amounts of land, all of which can be put to better use growing food for humans.

It distorts the market so you get things like high fructose corn syrup drinks instead of sugar -- which, BTW, has high tariffs to protect domestic growers -- while consumers would probably prefer sugar drinks if they had a real choice.

HFCS is common not just because of corn subsidies, but also because of sugar tariffs. The US has very high protective tariffs for our domestic sugar industry, which makes sugar more expensive in the US relative to the rest of the world. HFCS steps into that price differential.

Flip it around. Why is subsidizing corn a good thing?

It's great if you're trying to win a PR show against a cold war rival and bankrupt them. That was the original purpose of the USDA including roads, marketing, and subsidies.

These days its mostly because Iowa has an outsized role in our elections.

Not just PR. To have a stockpile of carbohydrates in case of Total War.

It's better to produce too much food and keep it cheap than to risk a shortage and have people starve.

In nature nothing is ever produced in a vacuum. There is a bill to pay for overproducing and the effects are coming for us.

I know you are alluding to climate change, but paying money for security is perfectly fine.

The US produces far more corn than is needed for a secure supply of human food for the US population.

Or immigration.

Besides the benefits to American agriculture and rural industry - cheap corn offers the world an environmentally better option compared to the alternatives of palm oil and other slash and burn crops.

I imagine if food production was not subsidized, much of it would naturally move to other countries with cheaper labour forces.

The USA doesn't want to be dependent on other countries for basic goods like food; imagine if there was an "OPEC" of food in 1973 and they decided to cut off the food supply to protest US support of Israel.

I'd rather tariff external corn than subsidize internal corn. That would mean we make enough to support ourselves but don't pay tax dollars to support someone selling their corn to other countries.

Most agriculture is not particularly labor-intensive now. We have robot tractors and ploughs and industrial scale feedlots and slaughterhouses. The average farmer cultivates over 300 acres, and that number is distorted downwards by large numbers of family farmers. Pure agribusiness can cultivate many square miles with basically no people.

The exception are soft fruits like strawberries, avocados, or apricots, where harvesting them mechanically will bruise them beyond what a consumer's willing to eat. These are luxuries, not staples, though. Things like wheat, corn, and other grains get harvested by giant machines and require little labor input.

It's still cheaper to export those machines to Brazil or something and have someone poorer drive the tractors and combine harvesters around and maintain them. No winter either so the utilization would be higher.

Not when you figure in transportation costs. Food is perishable, bulky, and labor-intensive to ship. Even with modern automated railroads and containerization (which aren't necessarily present in countries with cheaper labor), you can very easily spend more in transit than you do in growing & harvesting the food.

Sure, for labor-intensive crops, you might think that.

But the US doesn't subsidize labor-intensive crops.

The biggest corn subsidy in the US is ethanol for vehicles. It can take as much as 2 gallons of gasoline to produce a single gallon of ethanol, so this is just insane. This was a known fact before the subsidy was passed and was an incontrovertible fact after it was passed, and yet it is now impossible to stay elected in the US and talk about rolling this subsidy back.

So it is absolutely horrible. (Fortunately car batteries are getting insanely good and this probably will likely fix itself.)

> It can take as much as 2 gallons of gasoline to produce a single gallon of ethanol, so this is just insane.

You got a source for that claim because wikipedia says it has a energy return on investment of 1.5:1 [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol

If you stopped subsidizing corn... meat price will go way up.

This is good for the environment.

Because too much is grown, at meh quality, and so we end up with byproducts like HFCS (instead of cane sugar) or cheap animal feed because farmers aren't responding to market demand.

We might also note that many farmers grow types of corn bred and genetically tweaked such that it's not even really fit for human consumption but rather maximizes properties ideal for industrial processing.

> HFCS (instead of cane sugar)

Minor suggestion but the more realistic alternative is beet sugar, which is far more local to most of North America and Europe. Cane sugar is typically a more expensive imported thing, at least in much of the US and where I currently live in Europe.

As I understand it beet only makes economic sense if you can process it where it's growing or nearby. The transport costs are so much higher (less sugar dense plant? not sure why) that cane producers will out-compete you unless you get rid of that problem.

I wonder how much of US corn subsidies exist because Iowa is so important to getting elected President?

It distorts the market, leading to suboptimal allocation of resources.

Farming is very fossil fuel intensive.

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