Big Sky Cairn

Corn is already expensive - driving up the cost of food - because the government has decided to interfere with the market demand for crops by heavily subsidizing corn production to be used in the production of ethanol.

“The reality is that people are dying already,” said Jacques Diouf, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “Naturally people won’t be sitting dying of starvation, they will react,” he said. The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted. “The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso,” said Mr Diouf. “There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50pc to 60pc of income goes to food,” he said.

Corn - now a source of energy - has already been a significant source of food in the United States.

“There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn,” he reports. Indeed, corn and its array of byproducts have so successfully colonized the U.S. diet — and so dominate the diets of the animals consumed here — that Americans have ripped the title of “the corn people” from Mexico, where corn was originally domesticated and remains a staple.

Iowa - in the heart of the bread-basket - is the nation’s largest producer of corn (pdf). By a long shot.

And now with millions upon millions of Iowa corn fields under water - with a complete loss of crops - supply is about to drop even as demand sky-rockets.

And we all know what happens in those circumstances…

Democrats vote to raise taxes on the evil profiteering farmers.