It seems that we are hitting the proverbial wall with the demand for corn outgrowing the ability of U.S. farmers to even grow it. While the promises of ethanol and other biofuels make a lot of sense in moving away from fossil fuels, they do take a serious amount of corn to make happen. Couple that with the fact that we use corn in many, many forms in a huge percentage of our food, and we find ourselves in a position where we have created a gigantic demand for a crop that takes a lot of land and resources to grow. We simply do not have the space.

And this over-demand is even happening with two of the last three years being record crop for corn. This year looks to be yet another record year, and at the same time the “corn carryover” will be at its lowest level since 2006-07. The USDA “estimated 1.478 billion bushels of corn will be in U.S. bins on August 31, when this marketing year ends, and 1.373 billion bushels will be on hand at the end of 2010/11,” according to Reuters.

"The number is definitely a negative, when you look at the carryout numbers," said Don Roose, U.S. Commodities analyst.

There are a lot more numbers to show how much less corn we have than we need, but it points to the same problem that we are over-reliant on this one crop. It’s a scary situation. We have invested a lot of our food and fuel infrastructure in processing and utilizing corn, and the capitalist model is for continual growth, so there is really no way for us to gracefully start using less. In a similar situation to what we have going on with oil, we are building an ever-growing system based on something that is in limited supply. Neither of them will work for our Earth, which has, while huge, a limited carrying capacity that we have to learn to respect.

Which brings us to the larger issue of population- will we be able to support the growing number of people who are being born? We are looking at well over 9 billion people within a few decades, and we are facing housing, water, fuel and food shortages even now. What are we going to do with several billion more people? If a country like the United States, where we have plenty of everything (even if it is un-equitably distributed) is looking at shortages on basic necessities like corn and water, what does this say for the world over? It says that we have to re-evaluate how we deal with population issues. Have we reached the carrying capacity of the Earth? If so, will we have to re-evaluate our conception of death and what it means to have the freedom to have children? Will we have to re-evaluate our conception of “enough,” and even our idea of what the size of a meal is? Or will we continue to do what we do until we hit a wall and explode, like so many other civilizations in the past have done.?

Photo Credit: ConanTheLibrarian