Corn has a deep-rooted history in North America. It was the cultivation of maize that allowed the fabled Mesoamerican civilizations to settle and construct the continent’s first sprawling metropolises. The growing of corn slowly worked its way north as a greater abundance of indigenous people began favoring an agrarian lifestyle over that of a hunter-gatherer. The Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims, after a decimation of the settlers’ population during the winter of 1620, how to cultivate the land and plant their staple, corn.
We know how the rest goes. The colonists continue settling the New World, break away from Britain and in order to fulfill their destiny of putting the entire stretch of land from Manhattan to California under U.S. control, they drive west staking claims of land and cultivating it to grow, once again, corn.
    Today the U.S. is the worlds leading supplier of corn. The EPA reports that in 2000 the US produced approximately ten billion bushels of corn. The vast majority of this cultivation occurs in what is commonly referred to as the Corn Belt, an area in the Midwest including Iowa and Illinois known for seemingly endless cornfields.
    Corn is causing problems, both domestic and foreign. Corn has managed to make its way into nearly every product you can buy at a conventional supermarket. The yearly plowing of fields in the Corn Belt releases carbon emissions; it is estimated that if cows are switched from their conventional corn fed diet to a grass based or “salad bar” diet, United States carbon emissions would reduce by up to twenty five percent. (Not to mention the nutritional benefits for both the cattle and beef consumers.)
    One could even make the argument that because a large majority of corn produced in states like Iowa and Illinois go to impoverished nations the government subsidizing for the overproduction of corn plays a large roll in the perpetuation of world hunger. Due to both the lack of financial as well as food resources in these overpopulated nations the introducing of foreign surplus crops continues population expansion. While it pains every humanitarian part of me to say so, ecology dictates that when a community of organisms has access to a large enough amount of food, their population will increase. Thus, by continually sending corn and other basic crops to these areas, the population of these nations never drops enough to reach a sustainable level.
    Corn has become a pertinent issue concerning the environment, fair trade and human rights. Yet today the government spends billions annually to ensure its overproduction. With a national debt already in the trillions, a planet full of environmental problems and countless starving individuals all around the globe, the subsidizing of corn in the quantities that are being produced today is no longer justified.