The biggest volume of those products by far is the biofuel colloquially known as ethanol. A mix of subsidies and mandates requires American gasoline to contain 10–15 percent of the corn-based product, which doesn’t sound like too much until you realize that at ethanol’s peak, some half of the American corn harvest was being turned into a gasoline additive. The mandate absorbed so much corn it drove up not just corn prices, but the prices of pretty much all crops by displacing farm acres to corn: wheat, soy, cotton, and hay got decidedly perky from the competition, as did pork and beef due to
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