While we're at it, stop subsidizing water that's used for exports. If a corporation wants to grow crops in California and sell them overseas, they shouldn't be getting cheaper water than US residents.
The way it works is that you have a set quantity of water rights, and even in a drought, your entire water right is fulfilled before the next person in line. This means that the farms on the bottom of the totem pole, which is ordered by seniority and 100 year old connections to grifters, not actual need or value or anything possibly meritocratic, gets whatever they can.
In fact, a huge publicized fight about water rights in california was only so the last group in line, a shitty farming company and group of companies in the literal desert, spent millions screaming about "We are letting all the water into the ocean to protect some dumb smelt" ended up with those smelt, which were the food source to lots of valuable fishing communities in the bay area, dying off and going completely extinct, and that farming community hasn't actually gotten anymore water because their original apportionment was not being fulfilled before, because it's a drought and they are last in line. This was a HUGE talking point all over fox news and it was stupid and meaningless.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-consumer-expendi...
I'm pretty sure mcdonalds and frito lays would still be advertising even if their input resources quadrupled in price.
Everything is made with corn syrup because it is cheap, because it is an easy use for corn. If we made it easier to turn into other products like beef feed and ethanol, or less profitable to use corn syrup like with a tax, then there would be less corn syrup in food, but anything that doesn't provide an easy use for the oversupply will not work, because it just doesn't meet the desire of the US government to keep an obscene oversupply of corn in the market.
It is just historically rural regions in the US farmed corn, and it was enough for the US and little bit of export.
But over time agriculture effectiveness has significantly improved due to: fertilizer technology (CF Industries), agricultural equipment (John Deere), seeds technology (Monsanto Bayer Dow Chemical), food processing.
Thanks to that, the yield has significantly improved and amount of corn produced has increased dramatically, even without increasing land
Think of Moore's Law, but applied to food instead of microtransistors
US corn farmers are producing so much corn with subsidies, that they dont know what to do with it.
From here you get more subsidies for ethanol gasoline (ethanol extracted from food - corn), and more subsidies for processed food - HFCS being added generously into everything!
Without corn overproduction, the sugar consumption would be much smaller in the US and diabetes problem would not be as severe as it is