International Herald Tribune Editorial - The consequences of corn

International Herald Tribune Editorial - The consequences of corn
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: April 9, 2007

By now, most American farmers know what they'll be planting this spring. And all across the country the answer is the same: corn, corn, corn.

The numbers are surprising. Farmers will plant some 90.5 million acres of corn this year - 12 million more than last year and the most since 1944. Soybean acres are down by more than 10 percent, and there are similar decreases in wheat and cotton.

The reason for this enormous shift is, of course, the ethanol boom and the corn rush it has created.

If it were just a matter of shifting the balance in already planted acreage - more corn, less wheat - a point of economic equilibrium might be found soon enough. The real trouble comes at the edges. This corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program. Since the mid-1980s, farmers have enrolled some 37 million acres of farmland in the program. This is land that has been returned to nature, and it is part of what Americans pay for through the farm bill. Much of it is unsuitable for crops - too hilly, too wet, too valuable as wildlife habitat - but when corn prices are this high, the idea of suitable changes swiftly.

Agricultural interest groups have begun to call on the Department of Agriculture to release some of this land from the reserve so that farmers can put it into corn production. The department has temporarily halted new enrollments in the program, and though it will probably not release land this year, the pressure to do so will only increase.

Much as we like the idea of ethanol production - and especially the potential of cellulosic ethanol, from sources other than corn - it would be a tragic mistake to jettison two decades of farm-based conservation for short-term profit. Corn ethanol will replace only a small fraction of the petroleum we use, and if it does so at the cost of a new agricultural land rush, then we will have lost much more in conservation than we gained in energy independence.