The trouble with looking at a single facet of American Agribusiness is that it will invariably look bizarre, and this is the case here.
W. Bush is somewhat to blame for the idea of centralizing food production and distribution. He was very big into the idea of a North American Union, the Plan Pueblo Panama, FTAA, the trans-Texas corridor, and other such nonsensical pipe dream indulgences.
However, that being said, all the second link did was to assert that one part of the system had been bled dry. And this is accurate. But that does not mean that the same has happened to its parallel systems.
(And truthfully, he killed his credibility at the end by saying, “As for bio-terrorism……considering we have more than 700 bio-weapons labs cris-crossing the country, its pretty safe to say that should we have a bio weapon attack, it will probably originate from a city near you.”)
Bottom line: Right now, almost 40% of our corn crop goes to ethanol.
The USDA site also says that 4.1% of U.S. corn (2008) goes for high fructose corn syrup. That means that since 29.9% of all U.S. cropland harvested was planted in corn in 2007, 1.2% of all U.S. cropland harvested in 2007 went for high fructose corn syrup. That’s only slightly less than the 1.5% of U.S. cropland devoted to vegetables or the 1.6% of U.S. cropland devoted to [fruit] orchards.
All the US has to do is stop converting corn into ethanol, and in short order, we are up to our eyebrows in corn.