AFTA NAFTA - The Bill Clinton Legacy - Hoodwinking the Public - Protecting the Rich

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Today President Obama is putting intense pressure on Congress to pass a major new trade treaty and the news media has failed to give it even cursory attention.  It was twenty years ago, the last Democrat President jammed a trade agreement down the throats of American workers and politicians and the negative consequences are still felt today.

It has now been twenty years since Bill Clinton slammed the NAFTA trade bill through congress in 1993, then implemented it in 1994, and we are just beginning to see the House of Cards it was built on and understand the Shroud of Secrecy he constructed to protect the rich.

Do you remember when Bill Clinton and his Vice President Al Gore undertook one of the most savage attempts at character assassination ever staged from the White House during the furious debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)?

The target of this attack was the very person who helped Clinton become president in 1992, Ross Perot.  In that election, Clinton won with just 43% of the vote.  Bush got 37.4% and Perot got 18.9%.  Perot's vote total kept Bush from being re-elected.

Only twice in the entire history of American politics did a third party candidate get more votes than Perot in 1992.  In 1856, Millard Fillmore got 21.5% of the vote, and in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt got 27.3% of the vote, neither won.  In fact, only three times in our history did a president a lower percent of votes than Clinton received and they were John Quincy Adams, Woodrow Wilson, and Abraham Lincoln.

I worked as a media advisor to Ross Perot during the NAFTA debates and witnessed firsthand the incredible attempts to discredit Perot.  The Clinton administration used a national debate between Al Gore and Perot on the Larry King show as the showcase using lighting, the chair placement, the camera angles, and every other trick in the book to diminish Perot and undermine his concerns.

Eventually, everything Perot warned could happen did happen and the Clinton-Gore victory in time would be among the most devastating of the Clinton years.  Democrats, the unions, all the minorities, and American manufacturing got sold out by the Clinton promise and to this day have continued to ignore the consequences.

In the end only Clinton and Gore were laughing, all the way to the bank, as both became the richest ex-president and ex-vice president in history, each raking in well over $200 million in personal wealth after gutting the nation's long term economy.

You need not take it from me, look at the analysis by NPR, a Progressive stalwart of the Democratic party, and even the AFL-CIO, whose blind faith in the Democrats has nearly destroyed all the good unions have accomplished.  Listen to their words when it comes to the economic security of America thanks to the Clinton trade initiative.

Once upon a time during the debate over NAFTA Clinton and Gore made many promises, and Perot warned the opposite would happen.  Vilified by the news media and the Clinton administration, Perot told the truth, Clinton and Gore did not, and the American public, are still paying for it.

   

Here are what others had to say about NAFTA.

AFL-CIO America's Unions

What have workers learned from 20 years of NAFTA?

·         It’s a flawed model that promotes the economic interests of a very few and at the expense of workers, consumers, farmers, communities, the environment and even democracy itself.

• While the overall volume of trade within North America due to NAFTA has increased and corporate profits have skyrocketed, wages have remained stagnant in all three countries.
• Productivity has increased, but workers’ share of these gains has decreased steadily, along with unionization rates.
• NAFTA pushed small Mexican farmers off their lands, increasing the flow of desperate undocumented migrants.
• It exacerbated inequality in all three countries.
• And the NAFTA labor side agreement has failed to accomplish its most basic mandate: to ensure compliance with fundamental labor rights and enforcement of national labor laws.

How It Is Destroying The Economy

By Michael Snyder

Global Research, 17 August 2014

The Economic Collapse 14 August 2014

NAFTA Is 20 Years Old – Here Are 20 Facts That Show

Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was one of the hottest political issues in the country.  When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans that it would reduce illegal immigration.  Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen.  He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a “giant sucking sound” as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country.  Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton.  Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.  But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don’t even realize that it is happening.  As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called “NAFTA on steroids”, and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.

It amazes me how the American people can fall for the same lies over and over again.  The lies that serial liar Barack Obama is telling about “free trade” and the globalization of the economy are the same lies that Bill Clinton was telling back in the early 1990s.  The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with Paul Craig Roberts…

I remember in the 90′s when former Presidential candidate Ross Perot emphatically stated that NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) would create a giant “sucking sound” of jobs being extracted away from the U.S.  He did not win the election, and NAFTA was instituted on Jan. 1, 1994. Now, 20 years later, we see the result of all the jobs that have been “sucked away” to other countries.

According to an article by the Economic Policy Institute on 1/3/14:

“Clinton and his collaborators promised that the deal would bring “good-paying American jobs,” a rising trade surplus with Mexico, and a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration. Considering that thousands of kids are pouring over the border as we speak, well, how’d that work out for us?

Many Americans like to remember Bill Clinton as a “great president” for some reason.  Well, it turns out that he was completely and totally wrong about NAFTA.  The following are 20 facts that show how NAFTA is destroying the economy…

#1 More than 845,000 American workers have been officially certified for Trade Adjustment Assistance because they lost their jobs due to imports from Mexico or Canada or because their factories were relocated to those nations.

#2 Overall, it is estimated that NAFTA has cost us well over a million jobs.

#3 U.S. manufacturers pay Mexican workers just a little over a dollar an hour to do jobs that American workers used to do.

#4 The number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has more than doubled since the implementation of NAFTA.

#5 In the year before NAFTA, the U.S. had a trade surplus with Mexico and the trade deficit with Canada was only 29.6 billion dollars.  Last year, the U.S. had a combined trade deficit with Mexico and Canada of 177 billion dollars.

#6 It has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every 1 billion dollars of goods that are imported from overseas.

#7 One professor has estimated that cutting the total U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

#8 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.  In fact, many of them are now being built in Mexico.

#9 NAFTA hasn’t worked out very well for Mexico either.  Since 1994, the average yearly rate of economic growth in Mexico has been less than one percent.

#10 The exporting of massive amounts of government-subsidized U.S. corn down into Mexico has destroyed more than a million Mexican jobs and has helped fuel the continual rise in the number of illegal immigrants coming north.

#11 Someone making minimum wage in Mexico today can buy 38 percent fewer consumer goods than the day before NAFTA went into effect.

#12 Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#13 Back in the 1980s, more than 20 percent of the jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs.  Today, only about 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

#14 We have fewer Americans working in manufacturing today than we did in 1950 even though our population has more than doubled since then.

#15 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, only 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#16 As I wrote about recently, one out of every six men in their prime working years (25 to 54) do not have a job at this point.

#17 Because we have shipped millions of jobs overseas, the competition for the jobs that remain has become extremely intense and this has put downward pressure on wages.  Right now, half the country makes $27,520 a year or less from their jobs.

#18 When adults cannot get decent jobs, it is often children that suffer the most.  It is hard to believe, but more than one out of every five children in the United States is living in poverty in 2014.

#19 In 1994, only 27 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 46 million Americans are on food stamps.

#20 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

NPR Public Citizen February 10, 2014

NAFTA’s Broken Promises 1994-2013:

Outcomes of the North American Free Trade Agreement

Excerpts - see full post at http://www.citizen.org/documents/NAFTA-at-20.pdf

In 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was sold to the American public with grand promises. NAFTA would create tens of thousands of good jobs here. U.S. farmers would export their way to wealth. NAFTA would bring Mexico’s standard of living up, providing new economic opportunities there that would reduce immigration to the United States.

NAFTA was an experiment, establishing a radically new “trade” agreement model. It exploded the boundaries of past trade pacts, which had focused narrowly on cutting tariffs and quotas. In contrast, NAFTA contained chapters that created new privileges and protections for foreign investors; required the three countries to waive domestic procurement preferences, such as Buy American; limited regulation of services, such as trucking and banking; extended medicine patent monopolies and limited food and product safety standards and border inspection.

After nineteen years of NAFTA, we can measure its actual outcomes. The grand promises made by proponents remain unfulfilled. Many outcomes are exactly the opposite of what was promised. Many U.S. firms used the new investor protections to relocate production to Mexico to take advantage of its low wages and weak environmental standards and to attack NAFTA countries’ environmental and health laws in foreign tribunals. Over $340 million in compensation to investors has been extracted from NAFTA governments via these “investor-state” challenges.

The small U.S. trade surplus with Mexico pre-NAFTA turned into a massive new trade deficit. The pre-NAFTA U.S. trade deficit with Canada expanded greatly. Overall, the inflation-adjusted U.S. trade deficit with Canada of $29.1 billion and the $2.5 billion surplus with Mexico in 1993 (the year before NAFTA took effect) turned into a combined NAFTA trade deficit of $181 billion by 2012.1 The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that the NAFTA deficit had eliminated about one million net American jobs by 2004.2 Meanwhile, U.S. food processors moved to Mexico to take advantage of low wages and food imports soared. U.S beef imports from Mexico and Canada, for example, have risen 130 percent since NAFTA took effect, and today U.S. consumption of “NAFTA” beef tops $1.3 billion annually.3 The export of subsidized U.S. corn did increase, displacing over one million Mexican campesino farmers. Their desperate migration pushed down wages in Mexico’s border maquiladora factory zone and contributed to a doubling of Mexican immigration to the United States.

The U.S. public’s view of NAFTA has intensified from broad opposition to overwhelming opposition to NAFTA-style trade deals. According to a 2012 Angus Reid Public Opinion poll, 53 percent of Americans believe the United States should “do whatever is necessary” to “renegotiate” or “leave” NAFTA, while only 15 percent believe the United States should “continue to be a member of NAFTA.” Rejection of the trade deal is the predominant stance of Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.4 NAFTA has drawn the ire of Americans across stunningly diverse demographics. A 2011 National Journal poll showed strong rejection of the status quo trade model from both lower-educated and higher-educated respondents,5 and a 2010 NBC News – Wall Street Journal survey revealed that a majority of upper-income respondents have now joined lower-income respondents in opposing NAFTA-style pacts.6 In addition, a 2008 Zogby poll found majority NAFTA opposition across nearly every surveyed demographic group, including independents, Hispanics, women, Catholics and Southerners.7

U.S. Job Loss, Not Gain

Projections on trade balance, jobs prove wrong. In 1993, Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) projected that NAFTA would lead to a rising U.S. trade surplus with Mexico, which would create 170,000 net new jobs in the United States.8 This figure was trumpeted by the Clinton administration and other NAFTA proponents. Hufbauer and Schott based their projection on the observation that when export growth outpaces the growth of imports, more jobs are created by trade than are destroyed by trade.9 Instead of an improved trade balance with Canada and Mexico, however, NAFTA resulted in an explosion of imports from Mexico and Canada that led to huge U.S. trade deficits. According to Hufbauer and Schott’s own methodology, these deficits meant major job loss. Less than two years after NAFTA’s implementation, even before the depth of the NAFTA deficit became evident, Hufbauer recognized that his jobs prediction was incongruent with the facts, telling the Wall Street Journal, “The best figure for the jobs effect of NAFTA is approximately zero…the lesson for me is to stay away from job forecasting.”10

Huge new NAFTA trade deficit emerges. The U.S. trade deficit with Canada of $29.1 billion and the $2.5 billion surplus with Mexico in 1993 (the year before NAFTA took effect) turned into a combined NAFTA trade deficit of $181 billion by 2012.11 This represents an increase in the “NAFTA deficit” of 580 percent. These are inflation-adjusted numbers, meaning the difference is not due to inflation, but an increase in the deficit in real terms. The U.S. deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada has worsened considerably more than the U.S. deficit with countries with which we have not signed NAFTA-style deals. Since NAFTA, the average annual growth of the U.S. trade deficit has been 45 percent higher with Mexico and Canada than with countries that are not party to a NAFTA-style trade pact.12 Defenders of NAFTA argue that the NAFTA deficit is really only oil imports. Although oil accounts for a substantial portion of the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico, the oil share of the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico actually declined from 77 percent in 1993 to 55 percent in 2012.13

Services and manufacturing export growth slows under NAFTA. A key claim of supporters of NAFTA-style trade pacts is that they create jobs by promoting faster U.S. export growth. By contrast, growth of U.S. exports to countries that are not Free Trade Agreement (FTA) partners has exceeded U.S. export growth to countries that are FTA partners by 38 percent over the last decade.14 Manufacturing and services exports in particular grew slower after NAFTA took effect. Since NAFTA’s enactment, U.S. manufacturing exports to Canada and Mexico have grown at less than half the rate seen in the years before NAFTA.15 Even growth in services exports, which were supposed to do especially well under the trade pact given a presumed U.S. comparative advantage in services, dropped precipitously after NAFTA’s implementation. During NAFTA’s first decade, the average growth rate in U.S. services exports fell by 58 percent compared to the decade before NAFTA, and has remained well below the pre-NAFTA rate through the present.16

One million American jobs lost to NAFTA. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the rising trade deficit with Mexico and Canada since NAFTA went into effect eliminated about one million net jobs in the United States by 2004.17 EPI further calculates that the ballooning trade deficit with Mexico alone destroyed about seven hundred thousand net U.S. jobs between NAFTA’s implementation and 2010.18 Moreover, official government data reveals that nearly five million U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost overall since NAFTA took effect.19 Obviously, not all of these lost U.S. manufacturing jobs – one out of every four of our manufacturing jobs – is due to NAFTA. The United States entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, China joined WTO in 2000 and the U.S. trade deficit with China soared thereafter. However, at the same time, given the methodology employed, it is also likely that the EPI estimates do not capture the full U.S. job loss associated with NAFTA. Service sector jobs have also been negatively impacted by NAFTA, as closed factories no longer demand services. EPI estimates that one third of the jobs lost due to the rising trade deficit under NAFTA were in non-manufacturing sectors of the economy.20 

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GMO Part 4. Does the USA Feed the World?

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Food, Antibiotics & Pesticides - Food Chain or Profit Stream?

A lot of confusion reigns when debating the role of the United States in feeding the world.  The following review of agriculture production in America will give you many of the answers you seek.

In a nutshell, we don't feed the world but we supply a whole lot of the food it needs to maintain the status quo.  However, productions only part of the equation.  For instance, how much of the food we produce is even intended for "human" consumption?

You may be stunned by the result.

For example, the United States  produces 32% of the world's corn crop.  About 20% of all USA corn production is exported out of the country.  Sounds like quite a lot of corn but it is the largest single crop grown in the world.

Yet 80% of the corn grown annually is used for animal feed for domestic and foreign livestock, poultry, and fish production.  I did say 80% of all production goes to feed animals and not the two-legged kind.

 

 

Numbers can be deceiving.  You need to hear the numbers, and the facts behind the numbers so you can fairly assess what is going on in this world.

We know 1.6 billion humans rely on local, family type farms for their food supply in which the farmers save their own seeds rather than buy them from the new farmers coop, the monolithic, multi-national, agricultural biotech corporations.
 

The very agricultural economy Germans brought to America in the 1800's is what is saving much of the world from starvation today.

Ironic isn't it?  We have evolved beyond the self-sufficient family farms of the turn of the last century.  As late as 1900 most American farmers were of German ancestry because they were widely regarded as the best husbandmen in the land.

Today those family farms in America have been largely replaced by corporate farms in the form of livestock feedlots, massive chicken complexes, fish farms and GMO driven field crops.

 

 

What drove this evolution of corporate farming and near extinction of the family farm since 1900?  Well, no matter what high and mighty public service is being gained by the destruction of family farms, I tend to be a little more jaundice in my analysis of this cultural shift.

To me behind all the "holier than thou" justifications bantered about there are two underlying realities called "antibodies" and "pesticides" combined with corporate America's insatiable obsession with greed.

It's no accident "greed" is one of the Cardinal sins or Seven Deadly sins of the Christian teachings.

Penicillin was the first antibiotic, discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1929, but it was not until the early 1940s that its true potential was acknowledged and large scale fermentation processes were developed for the production of antibiotics.

A few decades ago the owners of this multi-billion dollar industry realized they were destroying the immune system with the massive amounts of antibiotics being pumped into us through medicine and they needed a new market to sell the profit-rich drugs.

How about we take all the cows into feedlots, chickens into giant barns and fish into fish farms and forever change the face of agriculture.  In order for these critters to survive in such an unnatural environment we can use the antibiotics on the cows instead of the people, thus creating a massive new market.

Today 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States goes to chicken, pigs, cows and other animals that people eat, yet producers of meat and poultry are not required to report how they use the drugs — which ones, on what types of animal, and in what quantities.

By 2011 antibiotic sales for human use totaled 7.7 million pounds in America while animal use sales topped 29.9 million pounds.  Projected sales of antibiotics worldwide exceed $65 billion for 2014.

Like antibiotics pesticides exploded on the scene around World War II.  As you will note from the following list of types of pesticides there is something for everyone in this global market now worth $45 billion a year.

 

 

The major classes of pesticides are as follows:

Type of Pesticide - Target Pest Group

Acaricide - Mites, ticks, spiders

Antimicrobial -  Bacteria, viruses, other microbes

Attractant -  Attracts pests for monitoring or killing

Avicide - Birds

Fungicide -  Fungi

Herbicide Weeds

Insecticide -  Insects

Molluscicide -  Snails and slugs

Nematicide -  Nematodes

Piscicide -  Fish

Predacide -  Vertebrate predators

Repellent - Repels pests

Rodenticide - Rodents

Synergist - Improves performance of another pesticide

 

 

In the United States, pesticides are used on 900,000 farms and in 70 million households. Herbicides are the most widely used type of pesticide. Agriculture uses 75% of all pesticides, but 85% of all U.S. households have at least one pesticide in storage, and 63% have one to five stored. A Minnesota survey 5 found that on a per-acre basis urban dwellers use herbicides for lawn care at rates equal to those used by farmers for food production.

 

I suspect the need to protect and expand the combined market of $110 billion for antibiotics and pesticides as much as anything explains the push for packaged food products and expanded requirements for preservatives.

Add to that the fact chemical company patents on major drugs in these categories are expiring and the real market is already saturated and it seems "bottom line profit" is the greatest incentive for flooding the human and animal market with more stuff that is bad for us, for our immune system, and for our environment.

 

 

Major Crops Grown in the United States

In round numbers, U.S. farmers produce about $ 143 billion worth of crops and about $153 billion worth of livestock each year. Production data from the year 2011 for major agricultural crops grown in this country are highlighted in the following:
 

Major agricultural crops produced in the United States in 2011

(excluding root crops, citrus, vegetable, etc.)

Corn (grain)    84 million harvested acres           $63.9 billion

Soybeans         73.8 million harvested acres         $37.6 billion

Hay                  55.7 million harvested acres            $6.7 billion

Wheat             45.7 million harvested acres          $14.6 billion

Cotton              9.5 million harvested acres            $8.3 billion

Sorghum         3.9 million harvested acres             $1.3 billion

Rice                  2.6 million harvested acres            $2.9 billion

Source:
U.S. USDA. National Agricultural Statistics Service. Crop Production. March 8, 2013.

Corn: The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world, producing 32 percent of the world's corn crop in the early 2010s.  Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. The U.S. exports about 20 percent of the U.S. farmer's corn production. Corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country. Corn grown for silage accounts for about two percent of the total harvested cropland or about 6 million acres. The amount of land dedicated to corn silage production varies based on growing conditions. In years that produce weather unfavorable to high corn grain yields, corn can be "salvaged" by harvesting the entire plant as silage. Additionally, corn farming has become exponentially more efficient. If U.S. farmers in 1931 wanted to equivalently yield the same amount of corn as farmers in 2008, the 1931 farmers would need an additional 490 million acres!

According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production. The National Corn Growers Association also reports that each American consumes 25 pounds of corn annually. The crop is fed as ground grain, silage, high-moisture, and high-oil corn. About 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly (e.g. high fructose corn syrup). Cornhas a wide array of industrial uses including ethanol, a popular oxygenate in cleaner burning auto fuels.  In addition many household products contain corn,  including paints, candles, fireworks, drywall, sandpaper, dyes, crayons, shoe polish, antibiotics, and adhesives.

Sources:
National Corn Grower's Association 2013 Report. N.p., 11 Feb. 2013. Web.
U.S. USDA. Economic Research Service. Corn: Trade. N.p. Web.

 

 

Soybeans: Approximately 3.06 billion bushels of soybeans were harvested from 73.6 million acres of cropland in the U.S. in 2011. This acreage is roughly equivalent to that of corn grown for grain (84 million acres in 2011).Soybeans rank second, after corn, among the most-planted field crops in the U.S. Over 279,110 (2007 Census of Agriculture) farms in the U.S. produce soybeans making the U.S. the largest producer and exporter of soybeans. , accounting for over 50% of the world's soybean production and $3-4 billion in soybean and product exports in the late 2000s. Soybeans represent 50 percent of world oilseed production.

 

Soybeans are used to create a variety of products, the most basic of which are soybean oil, meal, and hulls. According to the United Soybean Board, soybean oil, used in both food manufacturing and frying and sautéing, is the number one edible oil in the U.S.  Currently, soybean oil represents approximately 65 percent of all edible oil consumed in the United States, down from about 79 percent in 2000 due to controversy over trans-fat. Soybean oil also makes its way into products ranging from anti-corrosion agents to Soy Diesel fuel to waterproof cement. Over 30 million tons of soybean meal is consumed as livestock feed in a year. Even the hulls are used as a component of cattle feed rations.

Sources:
U.S. USDA. ERS. Characteristics and Production Costs of U.S. Soybean Farms. N.p., Mar. 2002. Web.

U.S. USDA. ERS. Soybeans and Oil Crops: Background. Web. Accessed 4 Apr. 2013. <

U.S. USDA. ERS. Soybeans and Oil Crops: Trade. Web. Accessed 4 Apr. 2013.

United Soybean Board. New QUALISOY Efforts Reach out to Educate Soybean Value Chain. March 2013. Web.

Hay: Hay production in the United States exceeds 119 million tons per year. Alfalfa is the primary hay crop grown in this country. U.S. hay is produced mainly for domestic consumption although there is a growing export market. Hay can be packaged in bales or made into cubes or pellets. Hay crops also produce seeds that can be used for planting or as specialized grains.

Wheat: Over 160,810 (2007 Census of Agriculture)farms in the United States produce wheat and wheat production exceeds 2.27 billion bushels a year. The U.S. produces about 10% of the world's wheat and supplies about 25% of the world's wheat export market. About two-thirds of total U.S. wheat production comes from the Great Plains (from Texas to Montana).

Wheat is classified by time of year planted, hardness, and color (e.g. Hard Red Winter (HRW)). The characteristics of each class of wheat affect milling and baking when used in food products. Of the wheat consumed in the United States, over 70% is used for food products, about 22% is used for animal feed and residuals, and the remainder is used for seed.

Cotton: Fewer than 18,605 (2007 Census of Agriculture) farms in the United States produce cotton (2007 Census of Agriculture). Cotton is grown from coast-to-coast, but in only 17 southern states, concentrated in California, Texas, and the Southeast. According to the National Cotton Council of America, farms in those states produce over 30% of the world's cotton with annual exports of more than $7 billion. The nation's cotton farmers harvest about 15 million bales or 7.3 billion pounds of cotton each year.

Cotton is used in a number of consumer and industrial products and is also a feed and food ingredient. Most of the crop (75 percent) goes into apparel, 18 percent into home furnishings and 7 percent into industrial products each year. Cottonseed and cottonseed meal are used in feed for livestock, dairy cattle, and poultry. Cottonseed oil is also used for food products such as margarine and salad dressing.

Sources:
"World of Cotton." National Cotton Council. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.
U.S. USDA. NASS. 2007 Census of Agriculture, Cotton Industry. Web. 27 Jan. 2010.

Grain sorghum: In the United States, 26,242 farms grow grain sorghum. Grain Sorghumis used primarily as an animal feed, but also is used in food products and as an industrial feedstock. Industrial products that utilize sorghum include wallboard and biodegradable packaging materials. Worldwide, over half of the sorghum grown is for human consumption.

Some farmers grow sorghum as a hedge against drought. This water-efficient crop is more drought tolerant and requires fewer inputs than corn. Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Missouri produce most of the grain sorghum grown in this country. The U.S. exports almost half of the sorghum it produces and controls 70% to 80% of world sorghum exports.

As much as one-third of domestic sorghum production goes to produce biofuels like ethanol and its various co-products. With demand for renewable fuel sources increasing, demand for co-products like sorghum-DDG (dry distillers grain) will increase as well due the sorghum's favorable nutrition profile.

Sources:
"Biofuels." Sorghum Checkoff. N.p., Apr. 2012. Web. 04 Apr. 2013.
U.S. USDA. ERS. Feed Grains: Yearbook Tables; Overview: Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2013. <

Rice: Just over 6,084 (2007 Census of Agriculture)farms produce rice in the United States. Those farms are concentrated in four regions including the Arkansas Grand Prairie, the Mississippi Delta (parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana), the Gulf Coast (Texas and Southwest Louisiana), and the Sacramento Valley of California. There are three types of rice grain; long, medium, and short, and each growing region harvests the type of rice best suited for the land. U.S. rice production accounts for just under 2% of the world's total, but this country is the second leading rice exporter with  10% of the world market.

About 50 - 60% of the rice consumed in the U.S. is for direct food use; another 18% goes into processed foods, 10-12 percent goes into pet food, and most of the rest (about 10 percent) goes into beer production.

Source:
U.S. USDA. ERS. Rice: Trade. Web. Accessed 4 Apr. 2013.

 



GMO corn, soybeans dominate US market

Jun 04, 2013 by Veronique Dupont

The discovery of unauthorized genetically engineered wheat growing on a farm in the US state of Oregon has cast a spotlight on agricultural biotechnology and the debate about its safety.

The discovery of unauthorized genetically engineered wheat growing on a farm in the US state of Oregon has cast a spotlight on agricultural biotechnology and the debate about its safety.

While genetically engineered or genetically modified (GM) wheat has not been approved for commercial planting, GM corn and GM soybeans already reign supreme on American farms.

By 2012, 88 percent of corn (maize) and 94 percent of soy grown in the United States were genetically modified, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

And with the US market now well saturated, seed firms are eying China and South America to spur growth and profits.

The main players are US firms Monsanto, DuPont and Dow Chemical, as well as Germany's Bayer and Syngenta of Switzerland.

Since their introduction in the 1990s, GM products have conquered agriculture in the US and hold a large share of the food on Americans' plates.

Though most genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are not directly involved in human consumption, "60-70 percent of processed foods have ingredients derived from GMOs," said Bill Freese of the Center for Food Safety, an anti-GMO organization.

Besides corn and soybeans, GM crops grown in the US include cotton, sugar beets and rapeseed.

In addition, a genetically engineered growth hormone, recombinant bovine growth hormone, is widely injected in cows to boost milk production.

The US government vouches for the safety of GM products. The industry is regulated by the Department of Agriculture, for farm biotechnology, and the Food and Drug Administration, which governs food and food ingredients.

But the developers of the GM products are deeply involved in certifying their safety. The FDA, for instance, depends on a consultative process with developers who voluntarily present their plans to the agency before marketing the products.

Doubts are strong in Europe, where a number of countries, including France, have banned GM crops.

US farmers, though paying more to buy GM seeds, find them worthwhile. Corn and soybeans have been modified to improve resistance to weeds and insects, for example, to help farmers boost productivity.

"If by planting a GMO variety your yield increases faster than it would if you didn't, your future rewards are going to increase," said Bill Nelson, a soybean analyst at Doane Advisory Services.

And the structure of some government crop insurance programs favor that productivity, giving farmers even more incentive to plant GM seeds rather than traditional seeds.

For Freese, a science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, GM seeds' very dominance is promoting their use.

"It's become harder and harder for farmers to even find conventional seeds," Freese said.

"The big players bought up conventional seed companies," he said, "and the university public sector breeders which used to produce most of the seeds that farmers used have seen their funding reduced."

Freese noted that cross-pollination of conventional fields by GMO strains has become so widespread it is difficult to produce "pure" seeds that are not contaminated.

Some organic seed developers grow their seeds in South America because they cannot find sources to buy pure seeds in the US, he said.

Yet the seed giants are facing a growing opposition to GM products in the US, with some consumers calling for GM product labeling.

Ben & Jerry's, the activist ice-cream maker, said in April it would stop using GM-sourced ingredients, which make up 20 percent of its products by volume, by the end of the year.

Whole Foods Market, the upscale natural and organic supermarket chain, announced in March that all its products in its US and Canadian stores would be labeled if they contain genetically modified organisms by 2018.

Meanwhile, the outlook for the seed giants remains bright outside the US, especially in rapidly growing South America and China.

With China's expanding middle class and appetite for meat, the Asian powerhouse will need to import huge quantities of soybeans and corn for animal feed, Nelson said.

"That can't happen without the majority being GMO."
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