It's the ONLY reason why it's so heavily used.
Corn syrup and ethanol - two massively damaging products of a completely corrupt system that everyone refuses to change because of massive profits off taxpayers.
Any starch + amylase makes a syrup (my personal favorite is rice syrup). An extra process turns part of the glucose to fructose making it very sweet.
Sorry to crap on a point I mostly agree with in the name of technical correctness :)
The 89 million acres[1] of corn harvested in the US would be partly replaced by some other starchy crop x, and high fructose corn syrup would be partly replaced by high fructose x syrup.
The root problem is really the fact that we as a nation eat too much food, and too much cheap, high-carbohydrate, calorie-dense, processed food. I agree with cutting corn subsidies, but the real solution is on the demand side.
1: http://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornac....
I really don't know how to fix it, because it is more the subconscious drive to overeat when you can than any cultural issue. Food is plentiful and cheap, so Americans devour it incessantly. One thing I think could fix it is decoupling the social aspects of eating - most families only see each other for food, which prompts them to eat more if subconsciously they want more human interaction.
It is also known you eat more when you aren't happy, so obviously make people happier, which isn't something as a society we are doing much of.
This isn't really the case.
The problem is that the processed food we are creating is so abnormal, our bodies simply don't know how to respond to it. The overwhelming amount of health issues that we are experiencing as a nation is a direct result of this.
Your body has pre-configured "stop" signals based on volume and how full your stomach is. The processed foods are so dense in sugars and calories, your body responds improperly, and as a result, people "over eat".
If we revert to eating things that we can actually identify the contents of, you'll find that we will very quickly stop over eating.
> most families only see each other for food
This happens in most European countries as well, it's by no means an American thing.
- Average price of raw sugar, world market: $492.8 per tonne
- Average price of HFCS-55, US market: $528.1 per tonne (HFCS-55 has equivalent sweetness to sucrose.)
Sugar vs. HFCS is a natural experiment. Americans are the experimental group, and the rest of the world is the control group. In non-OECD countries, HFCS has less than 1% market share. Why would you pay more money for an inferior product?
And remember -- the price of high-fructose corn syrup includes subsidies. In a free market, with no corn subsidies and no sugar tariffs, HFCS would be at an even greater price disadvantage.
Source: OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook, 2011-2020, p. 132. http://www.oecd.org/site/oecd-faoagriculturaloutlook/4818429...
Is there anything useful that can be derived from that experiment, though? The control group varies in significant ways, both amongst itself and w.r.t. Americans, and includes countries with both high and low levels of obesity. Has anyone attempted to back out any kind of useful estimate by treating this as a natural experiment and adjusting for confounds?
Examples: most sugar in both Germany and Mexico is from sugar rather than HFCS, but Germany is less obese than the US, while Mexico is more obese than the US. Mexico is poorer than either the US or Germany, so that could be the confound; but Germans walk and bike more than either the US or Mexico, so that could be a different confound. It's kind of a messy experiment.
Corn is the US climate friendly equivalent of sugarcane. Sugar cane is the most harvested crop worldwide. Sugarcane has heavy import tariffs in the US as welfare for the domestic corn industry.
Brazil has a 22% Ethanol requirement on its gasoline and all that comes from sugar cane.
But sugarcane is not the only way to produce sucrose!
Sugar beets currently account for 55% of sugar production in the United States. [1]
What's more, sugar beets will grow in relatively poor soil. Top four sugarbeet-producing states: Minnesota, Idaho, North Dakota, and Michigan [2].
Notice how these are not states renowned for the quality of their soil. Idaho grows a lot of potatoes not because they want to, but because the soil won't support a more valuable crop.
So, we're chewing up our best agricultural land and paying billions of dollars in subsidies to grow an inferior substitute to sucrose. Instead of growing the real thing on our marginal agricultural lands.
It's not even close.
Sources:
[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-sweeteners/backgr...
[2] http://www.fas.usda.gov/info/factsheets/CAFTA/statesugarprod...
Subsidies distort the market, and produce completely illogical results. You can't get rid of just one subsidy, because that just gives an advantage to the next-most-subsidized item. But remove all the subsidies, and things will return to an economically-rational state of affairs.
If the total amount of subsidy $ is reduced, it will be an improvement.
The other thing is most people don't realize how many things HFCS is in. Ketchup, iced tea, most cereals, most "fruit" drinks.
US subsidies to corn and subsidies to.any ethanol.resulted that selling cane ethanol to US and buying corn ethanol turns a profit for fuel.companies. Yes, it is that bad, diesel.pollution with shipping and all.
So basically the ethanol infrastructure got all messed up to the point were it couldn't even keep up with the domestic supply. If it were not for that then brazilian ethanol would actually be able to compete with some of the american ethanol because sugar cane gives higher yields and nowadays you can charge a premium for being more environmentally friendly.
If corn gets more expensive, and that may mean that people need to squeexe their food budgets and buy fewers expensive foods like vegetables, and instead by more corn sugar, which is still cheapest per-calorie.
It appears that people used to eat more food in the past. At least for Finland, modern Finns eat 40% less calories than they used to 100 years ago. The reason is that agriculture work demands a lot of calories.
"Too much food" is of course relative to how much food your body needs, given how physically active you are.
But, I suspect that Americans on average both get less exercise and consume more calories than they did 100 years ago.
Regarding the idea that sucrose is healthier than HFCS, I remain unconvinced.
See Robert H. Lustig's awesome expostion, Sugar: The Bitter Truth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
He explains the endocrinology behind why our bodies cannot stay ahead of our sugar intake.
fructose + glucose = sucrose. Body needs glucose. Fructose goes straight to liver, metabolized like alcohol, a bunch of bad stuff happens. Reason fruits are better than fruit juice is the fiber blocks the fructose from being metabolized, letting the needed glucose through.
Eating straight refined sugar is probably almost as bad as HFCS. But other sources of sugar (in moderation) are proably fine.
FWIW, I add fruit into my morning kale smoothie, and it tastes delicious.
Can we get a source on this? I'm very curious, because I eat a ton of fruit with a lot of fructose every day and this Lustig video has gotten me worried.
The loans are based on a variety of factors and have a variety of goals from ensuring that family farms exist (and don't get gobbled by mega-farm corps) to ensuring that we grow certain kinds of crops in this country to ensuring we build better combines. It's very complicated and any 'narrative' that has a single cause or explanation is likely incorrect.
You cannot just simply transition into other non-grain crops because nobody has the multi-million dollar investment that it would take to build up the necessary infrastructure, the environment is not always suitable for all types of food, and you cannot get away with growing the same crop year after year. Corn solves a lot of those problems, even if it ends up creating others, as you point out.
It is a pretty deep problem that cannot be solved with just a stroke of a pen, though innovation is always welcome on the farm, if you have real solutions.
It's quite possible they should stop being farmers and that the nation should farm out (get it?) much of its agriculture to the developing world. This is certainly what "the market" dictates and something which government spends a lot of money working to prevent.
Also, there is growing concern for our ability to replenish food-stocks as-is. If farming ceases in these nations, you lose a lot of food people directly eat too.
While it's true that having crops in the fields would help keep people fed during a world war that disrupted world agriculture, that's not the reason "the work the government does to maintain the local food supply exists." It exists because agriculture has a powerful lobby and they make a lot of money this way. Poor, developing world farmers don't get a vote.
It's sometimes used as a post-hoc justification for what is done.
> Also, there is growing concern for our ability to replenish food-stocks as-is. If farming ceases in these nations, you lose a lot of food people directly eat too.
Killing developed world agricultural subsidies and allowing market competition to stimulate agricultural production in the developing world is one of those things that seems to unite almost all economists. This seems to be because they think it will make food less expensive and more accessible. I'm not familiar with anyone making the opposite case?
However if you can convince farmers to always grow extra, then the difference between a good year and a bad one is closer to 10%, and you never have famines.
After repeated bad experiences, every country with the capability has decided that they want farmers to grow extra in normal years. After that the question becomes how to subsidize them.
If subsidization of farmers to produce more than the market is predicted to demand in order to smooth out volatility and prevent famine is necessary (and it seems to me like a laudable goal), government can simply fund overseas farmers to overproduce, rather than its own. It would be less expensive than the current process in those cases where overseas farmers produce more cheaply. In many cases they'd still be subsidizing their own farmers.
Pretty much the only thing that would be untenable would be the current practice of paying "farmers" who own land to not produce. As far as I can tell everyone who doesn't receive that money hates the practice, so maybe we should just stop doing it. Which brings me to...
> After repeated bad experiences, every country with the capability has decided that they want farmers to grow extra in normal years.
They haven't really. It's not like we ever had a vote on it. The current process is just a powerful lobby exercising their considerable power.
Sure, there's no hard evidence given with any assertion, but there aren't really in the immediate ancestors either. This just seems to be an unpopular view, but I think that it's better to offer a counterargument than to downvote in that case, especially since downvoting visually deemphasizes the comment, which surely leads to fewer people reading it. To me, that outcome doesn't seem justified for this comment.
I claimed that the price of agricultural goods is inelastic. That's easy to verify one way or another. In 2011 the world produced 5% less of basic staples than normal. Prices of basic food staples doubled worldwide. Many countries had riots as a result. There you go, price inelasticity in action. (In fact the inelasticity of demand to price for food is the standard textbook example of price inelasticity.)
See http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/soaring-food-pri... for verification of the 2011 food price claim.
Odd. I thought the issue of elasticity was uninteresting and didn't really intend to comment on it.
In any case, you're giving downvoters a little too much credit. "Hulk disagree! Hulk smash, downvote!"
> See http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/soaring-food-pri.... for verification of the 2011 food price claim.
For a good time, google "krugman agricultural subsidies".
I don't believe it is false. Instead of explaining again, can you provide specific verifiable assertions and citations? I'll make it easy, I'll give you specifics to refute.
If subsidization of farmers to produce more than the market is predicted to demand in order to smooth out volatility and prevent famine is necessary (and it seems to me like a laudable goal), government can simply fund overseas farmers to overproduce, rather than its own. It would be less expensive than the current process in those cases where overseas farmers produce more cheaply. In many cases they'd still be subsidizing their own farmers.
Is your argument truly based on the assumption that government generally solve problems in efficient ways??
The truth is that it is easier for most governments to justify giving subsidies to their own citizens rather than foreign countries. Also self-sufficiency on food is seen by many as a security issue, and therefore there is a resistance to relying on others.
That said, different countries use different solutions. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/may/10/chi... for a news article indicating that China is taking exactly the efficient approach that you suggest.
Pretty much the only thing that would be untenable would be the current practice of paying "farmers" who own land to not produce. As far as I can tell everyone who doesn't receive that money hates the practice, so maybe we should just stop doing it. Which brings me to...
The USA pays people to keep land ready but unused so that production can rapidly improve. The European Union instead accumulates surpluses - aka the famous "butter mountains" and "milk lakes". Those are just different means to the same end - ensuring that there won't be a major famine.
> After repeated bad experiences, every country with the capability has decided that they want farmers to grow extra in normal years.
They haven't really. It's not like we ever had a vote on it. The current process is just a powerful lobby exercising their considerable power.
No, YOU never got to vote on it. It was before your time. That doesn't mean that I am wrong.
The European Union's policies were explicitly adopted as a reaction to famines after WW II. (Which in turn were significantly lessened thanks to major US intervention.) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy for confirmation.
The US policies started earlier, and were motivated by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. http://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2012/11/16/ken-burns-dus... is one of the first links that I came to which can verify that.
I don't disagree with that statement at all. It is a statement that only speaks to public sentiment and it strikes me as probably correct.
> Also self-sufficiency on food is seen by many as a security issue, and therefore there is a resistance to relying on others.
I don't disagree but I suspect there's little actual analysis going on among most people as to the actual tradeoff: the current system means we have an agricultural system that can carry us if we have to fight a world war capable of completely disrupting world food markets, as we are a net exporter of food. On the other hand strife, terrorism, and small wars are more likely until the developing world actually leaves extreme poverty behind. Having to compete with subsidized agriculture in the developed world slows this process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#Poverty_i...
> The USA pays people to keep land ready but unused so that production can rapidly improve.
The only guy I know who gets one of those subsidy checks because he owns land will never, ever be a farmer. His yard was farmland once. Interesting system.
> The European Union instead accumulates surpluses - aka the famous "butter mountains" and "milk lakes". Those are just different means to the same end - ensuring that there won't be a major famine.
The policy contributes to poverty and famine in Africa. Ideally we would find a way to mitigate famine risk here without sticking it to them.
> The US policies started earlier, and were motivated by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
I can't speak to European policy but the incentives and politics today in the US (in the area of agriculture, and everything else) are radically different than they were eighty years ago. Still, I take your point and thanks for sharing that.
As for African poverty and famine, you're right that measures that protect farmers in rich countries will hurt farmers in poor ones. However the #1 cause of African famine remains corruption and war inside of Africa. And on current economic trends, we'll see economic powerhouses emerging in Africa in near decades. So as sad as our neglect of the interests of over a billion Africans is, it does not seem to be a permanent boot in the face.
For perspective, take 5 minutes to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo. There are - today - African countries that are better off than any country in the world was 70 years ago. If others continue on trends that have happened elsewhere, things are going to improve fairly dramatically.
I agree with you that our agricultural policies create problems. But I'm optimistic about what the future holds for people who are impacted.
Storing food doesn't require subsidies. The government can buy non-subsidized food from the global market which may include local sources, and store it at their own expense.
During low-yield years, the private market (grocery stores) can buy food from the global market or from private food stores. If they cannot, the government can finally step in.
A fundamental reason countries that can afford it have agricultural subsidies is that a little overproduction ensures food security. If you outsource your food production to another country, and there's a worldwide food shortage, that country can demand almost anything from you and get it, because otherwise some of your people starve.
If a solution NEEDS to be found, it is more likely to be found.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-sweeteners/policy...
Corn subsidies are only about $2B a year, and 75% of corn is used for animal feed or ethanol.
http://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=corn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize#U.S._usage_breakdownAnd in theory, if ethanol were widely adopted as a fuel source in the US, we could potentially move to production using GM algae or something similar that would actually be efficient.
> Thanks for the laugh.
Speaking of which, please don't abuse the other members. It only undermines your humanitarian intentions.