The New York Times calls this year’s near record corn harvest in Iowa a sign of “America’s efficient farmers”. I look at the football field sized mountain of corn in the photo and see the tell tale signs of an agricultural system in decline. It isn’t efficiency that makes this type of over-production possible, it’s oil.

Estimates of U.S. Agricultural efficiency in caloric terms vary, but according to agricultural engineer William Chancellor, seven calories of fossil fuels are required for every calorie of food energy produced. The New York Time’s discussion is an analysis of escalating farm subsidies as a result of over production.

And this brings us to the issue of free trade. The question asked on the Adventures in Ethical Consumerism blog is this: can trade liberalization help people out of poverty? The answer is yes, but trade must really be free for it to be an effective poverty reduction strategy. Agricultural subsidies are the monolithic remanant of the centrally-planned Keynesian model of economics that has largely been abandoned in most other sectors of the U.S. Economy.

Massive agricultural subsidies in both the E.U. and the U.S. have eliminated the competitive edge for most farmer’s in developing countries. This has been an important factor in their continued resistance to more trade liberalization treaties. Southern governments know that opening their markets to the artificially cheap agricultural products coming from the North will be the death knell for small farmers around the world. This will mean more migration to cities and industrialized nations, rapid urbanization, and the destruction of rural communities and traditions.