The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

The world’s biggest and most creative field corn consumers are the Americans, who produce field corn in such prodigious quantities, they feel it reasonable to process it into thousands of products, ranging from high-fructose corn syrup to faux-plastic bottles to sparkplug ceramics to schoolhouse chalk. 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 the higher costs for feed.