Artificial Scarcity: Overproduction, Demand Management, and the Ecological Cost of Stabilizing Commodity Agriculture

For more than a century, North American agriculture has lived inside the wrong story about scarcity. The public story says farmland must continually intensify and expand because farmers are feeding growing cities and an ever larger world. The emotional force of that story is considerable. It appeals to necessity, duty, and even gratitude. But analytically it is weak. North American commodity agriculture has long struggled with chronic overproduction, collapsing prices of agricultural commodity crops that jeopardize farm economic viability, and created a recurring political problem of how to keep farms in business.[1]

This perspective changes what kinds of policies make sense. If the central problem were a shortage of food, then continuous agricultural intensification and cropland expansion would appear unavoidable. But if the system repeatedly generates excess and surplus, then the real question is very different: how do states and markets manage overproduction without crushing farm viability? Much of modern agricultural policy can be read as a series of answers to that question.

Again and again, governments have turned to demand-side policies that absorb surplus rather than resolve the production logic behind it. Those policies were often presented to the public as moral or environmental goods: humanitarian food aid, climate-friendly biofuels, rural development, energy security. Yet they also served an internal function. They helped stabilize prices, prep up land values, and preserve a commodity system that continually produced more than markets could absorb at prices that allow viable farming.[2]

The result has been costly in more ways than one. Citizens pay directly through farm subsidies, tax expenditures, compliance costs, and fuel-market effects. They pay indirectly through water contamination, air pollution, biodiversity loss, degraded soils, a destabilized water cycle, and rising health burdens in landscapes dominated by chemically intensive monoculture.[3] In this sense, current overproduction-management policies do not simply shape farm markets. They reshape the ecological foundations of life itself.

Overproduction, Technological Change, and the Treadmill

The classic framework for understanding this problem remains Willard Cochrane’s “treadmill.” Early adopters of new technology or new management gain a temporary advantage through lower costs or higher yields. But once innovation diffuses across the sector, supply rises and prices fall. The advantage of early adopters disappears, while late adapters are squeezed out of the market. Farms then need to expand to survive, often by taking on more land, more debt, and more risk. Innovation does not eliminate the income problem; it often recreates it at a larger scale.[4]

Cochrane’s threadmill dynamic is especially powerful in commodity agriculture. The combination of yield growth, mechanization, globalized marketing, and price-taking behaviour means the system tends toward oversupply. When production outruns remunerative demand, prices collapse. Farm incomes suffer. Land rents and land values become part of the squeeze, because any policy or market signal that promises future returns is quickly capitalized into the price of land. The recurring policy problem is not just low prices. It is a structural system that reproduces surplus, margin squeeze, and consolidation.[5]

Seen in this light, the familiar story that farmers must endlessly intensify to feed the world becomes less plausible. It mistakes artificial scarcity for ecological necessity. In a system defined by chronic surplus and disposal problems, the pressure to expand is not simply the expression of human need. It is also the product of policy design, market structure, and the treadmill logic of technological competition.

Food Aid: Relief, Surplus Disposal, and Political Leverage

First off, this section is not to deny the legitimacy of food relief. I support emergency shipments of food after war, natural disasters, famine, and other forms of social breakdown. Food exports also play a legitimate role in feeding populations living under severe ecological constraints, including lasting drought and fragile dryland systems.

But that is only part of the history of food aid. In the United States, Public Law 480—later known as Food for Peace—also functioned as a mechanism for disposing of agricultural surpluses, supporting farm prices, and moving commodities offshore.[6] Externally, the program was framed as humanitarian relief, anti-hunger development, and diplomatic generosity. Internally, it also helped manage stocks and maintain the economic viability of domestic farm policy.

This dual reality is well documented. Food aid can save lives in acute crisis while still being structured in ways that serve domestic surplus management and geopolitical strategy. Tied and monetized food aid has often undercut local grain markets and weakened local food systems. In some cases, poorly timed shipments depressed farmgate prices during recovery periods and discouraged local production just when rebuilding was most needed.[7]

Haiti remains one of the clearest examples of this pattern. There, food imports—especially rice—became entangled with trade liberalization, aid dependence, and the weakening of domestic production. The now-famous retrospective regret voiced by Bill Clinton was an admission that food imports and trade policy had damaged Haiti’s agricultural base while being justified in the language of development and affordability.[8]

The lesson is not that emergency relief is wrong. It is that a policy can be morally framed while still serving domestic surplus disposal and international power. That pattern would later reappear in another, greener form.

Biofuels: Climate Narrative, Price Support, and Land Pressure

What food aid policy served in the twentieth-century answer to agricultural surplus, the twenty-first-century answer are biofuel policies and mandates. The Renewable Fuel Standard and related ethanol mandates created a relatively inflexible demand floor for corn and other feedstocks. Publicly, this was sold as climate mitigation, energy security, and rural renewal. Internally, it created stable crop demand, supported land and commodity markets, and provided a powerful new outlet for surplus production.[9]

Mandated blending creates a regulation-backed demand floor. Once such demand floor is established by governments, markets adjust dynamically. Corn prices, land rents, and land-value expectations adjust. Crop choices shift. Crop rotations simplify. More marginal land is pulled into production, driven by short-lived agricultural profitability. What appears as climate policy is also a way of stabilizing commodity markets.

The climate case for corn ethanol, moreover, is far weaker than its public narrative suggests. While ethanol displaces some fossil fuel at the tailpipe, the narrative remains silent about how the agricultural system as a whole increases emissions because cropland expands into natural areas. Biofuel mandates do not adequately account for carbon losses from land-use expansion. Once the carbon released from wetland drainage, forest and grassland conversion, soil carbon depletion, and displaced expansion elsewhere is accounted for, biofuels likely release more greenhouse gases than any fossil source for gasoline. [10]

The evidence that biofuel accounting fundamentally gets it wrong is increasingly difficult to ignore. Searchinger’s classic land-use change argument forced this issue into the open, and more recent empirical work has strengthened the case that U.S. biofuel policy increased land conversion, worsened water-quality outcomes, and failed to deliver any greenhouse-gas emission reductions.[11] The National Farmers Union’s recent report on sustainable aviation fuels extends that critique into the next wave of biofuel policy, warning that crop-based SAF narratives risk repeating the same land-use and carbon-accounting failures under a new banner.[12]

This is not a technical accounting dispute, or a temporary hick-up while our vehicle fleet is being electrified. If biotic carbon losses and land-use effects are counted properly, the climate case for corn ethanol weakens sharply and may reverse. In that light, biofuel policy looks less like a climate solution than like a new demand-management strategy wearing green language.

Land as Asset, Policy Lock-In, and Financial Spillover

Once policy-backed demand stabilizes expectations, farmland begins to function not just as productive land but as an investment asset. Stable demand floors support land values, rents, and secure return of investment. That attracts not just farmers but financial actors, lenders, and speculators who treat farmland and related infrastructure as relatively secure components of larger portfolios.[13]

This spillover into financial markets matters politically as well as economically. Financialization helps lock in the policy regime by broadening the coalition that defends a flawed policy. Landowners benefit from rising values. Processors benefit from stable throughput. Lenders benefit from capitalized asset values. Investors gain access to assets that appear comparatively safe because demand is underwritten by government policy. In effect, the more policy-backed returns are capitalized into land and infrastructure, the harder it becomes to challenge the policies that created them in the first place.

This is where the story becomes especially troubling. Ecological degradation is no longer driven only by farmers responding to narrow margins. It is increasingly shaped by investment structures seeking stable returns and political continuity. Capital can flow into farmland at extraordinary scale when downside risk appears limited. As a result, land conversion and simplification become embedded not only in agricultural practice, but in the logic of finance.

Recent communications around sustainable aviation fuel underline this process in real time. Public officials, including Secretary Tom Vilsack, have repeatedly framed SAF as a major future growth industry and opportunity for agricultural producers.[14] Even where stricter climate-accounting rules later threatened to exclude much conventional ethanol from those subsidies, the market signal was already being sent: another large, policy-backed demand stream for commodity agriculture might be on the horizon.[15]

The Landscape Cost of Managing Surplus

When demand is artificially secured, land pressure intensifies. The consequences are by now familiar: expansion into marginal land, wetland drainage, forest and grassland conversion, simplified rotations, and greater dependence on fertilizers and chemical inputs. These effects are structurally linked to policies that absorb surplus while leaving the treadmill intact.[16]

These effects do not stop at national borders. Lands are pressured internationally through trade, in technical language refered to as “indirect land-use change” (ILUC). ILUC is one reason why the environmental costs of demand-side stabilization often appear lower in official narratives than they are in reality: damages are distributed across places, sectors, and timescales. But displacement does not make them less relevant for our planet.

Food aid, biofuel mandates, and other demand floors therefore share a common feature: they manage the symptoms of overproduction without resolving the underlying logic and market structure. Innovation, mechanization, land competition, and policy-backed demand continue to recreate surplus in new forms. The system survives by displacing its costs—onto landscapes, onto taxpayers, onto public health, and onto future generations.[17]

The Conservation Blind Spot

This is where conservation needs to look more carefully at agriculture. Too often, conservation narratives accept agricultural intensification as inevitable because of “feeding the world.” The “feeding the world” or “farmers feed cities” story functions as social licence for industrial agriculture. It frames land pressure as moral necessity, when in many cases it is policy-made rather than a reflection of biophysically scarcity.[18]

Yet, the feeding-the-world narrative traps conservation in a defensive posture. If land pressure is treated as inevitable, then conservation can do little more than protect fragments while the surrounding matrix continues to degrade. It justifies why protected areas become islands in a sea of intensification.

Meanwhile, the public pays the bill. The direct costs include subsidies, tax expenditures, compliance costs, and fuel-market effects. The indirect costs include water treatment, biodiversity loss, degraded air quality, declining soil health, a broken water cycle, and mounting health burdens in chemically intensive agricultural regions. Iowa is a telling example. According to the 2025 Iowa Cancer Registry report, the state has the second-highest age-adjusted rate of new cancers in the United States and is one of only two states with a rising age-adjusted incidence trend.[19] That does not prove biofuels or corn monoculture alone caused Iowa’s cancer burden. But it does underscore a broader truth: the costs of intensive agricultural landscapes are borne not only in ecosystems, but in bodies.

A conservation movement serious about root causes cannot stop at habitat protection alone. It has to confront the economic drivers of expanding land demand, and the public costs these policies impose on taxpayers, communities, and the commons.

Why the Blind Spot Persists: From Guilt to Participation

Our morals and psychology stabilizes this pattern. The “farmers feed cities” narrative not only justifies industrial agriculture, it also places urban publics in a difficult emotional position. If one’s very human existence appears to depend on ecological damage, then critique becomes psychologically unstable. People collapse into guilt, shame, or resignation.

Such a moral horizon tends to organize environmental action around reducing harm rather than creating benefit: pollute less, consume less badly, shrink your footprint! Charity can function as a low-transformation response to guilt because it offers momentary relief without requiring durable changes in participation. By contrast, rediscovering a reciprocal relationship with the land demands ongoing behavioural and relational change.[20]

In a secular register, this can resemble what John Vervaeke calls a lingering “God grammar”: a moral structure in which human existence is felt as burdened or “original sin”, and innocence is sought through restraint – even when explicit Christian belief has receded.[21] By contrast, Indigenous and regenerative perspectives often frame people not only as potential degraders, but as capable of reciprocal, beneficial participation in living systems. Robin Wall Kimmerer has repeatedly challenged the assumption that humans can only diminish the world, noting how difficult it is for many Western students even to imagine that positive human impact on ecosystems could exist.[22]

Culturally and politically, a society organized around guilt can accept “do less harm,” but struggles to imagine “regenerate more.” Yet ecological farming and living landscapes require exactly that second imagination: not innocence through withdrawal, but beneficial presence through care, reciprocity, and participation.

Another Path: Ecological Farming and Conservation Together

If current demand-side policies intensify land pressure, then one obvious alternative is to reduce the need to absorb surplus through ecologically destructive land use in the first place. Ecological farming and conservation can do that together.

Protecting and restoring ecological function on working land is not only biodiversity work. It is also one path out of oversupply-driven land expansion. Perennial systems, rotational grazing, habitat-rich production, diversified crop design, and hybrid conservation easements can reduce dependence on treadmill logic while restoring the ecological functions of the agricultural matrix.

This is not only a land-use alternative. It is also a narrative alternative. Instead of “feeding the world” through extraction, it proposes stewarding the land base through reciprocal abundance. The point is not to romanticize smallness or deny the role of trade. It is to ask what kind of agricultural system can sustain farmers without liquidating landscapes.

Better Ways to Stabilize Farm Incomes

The real policy challenge, then, is not how to absorb ever more surplus through food dumping or fuel mandates. It is how to stabilize farm incomes and land access without driving ecological simplification.

That points toward a different policy mix: supply management approaches where appropriate, income supports decoupled from sheer production volume, conservation payments tied to ecological outcomes, and land-access models that reduce speculative pressure on farmland. Getting this policy mix right is not easy. But it is more honest than pretending the current system is feeding a hungry world when it is often managing oversupply through ecologically expensive demand creation.

From Feeding the World to Stewarding the Land Base

The dominant scarcity narrative of food has been politically useful for some, but ecologically disastrous. Food security does not depend on endless throughput. It depends on ecological integrity, resilient landscapes, and institutions capable of supporting farmers without forcing them onto a treadmill of oversupply, consolidation and landscape simplification, and land expansion.

Demand-side policies that stabilize prices by intensifying land pressure are self-defeating. They may temporarily manage surplus, but they do so by degrading the very commons that make agriculture possible: soil, water, biodiversity, climate stability, and the cultural capacity to care for land.

The deeper task is not merely to manage abundance more cleverly. It is to build agricultural systems that sustain farmers without liquidating landscapes. And to restore what has been lost in decades of flawed oversupply management.

Notes

1. E. Bowers, W. D. Rasmussen, and G. L. Baker, History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933–84, Agricultural Information Bulletin no. 485 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1984), https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/41988/50846_aib485a.pdf.
2. ; Robert Paarlberg, The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61644/chapter/539904003.
3. Tyler J. Lark et al., “Environmental Outcomes of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 9 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101084119; Iowa Cancer Registry, Cancer in Iowa 2025 (Iowa City: State Health Registry of Iowa, 2025), https://shri.public-health.uiowa.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/cancer-in-iowa-2025.pdf.
4. Willard W. Cochrane, Farm Prices: Myth and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958); Richard A. Levins, “The Treadmill Revisited,” Land Economics 72, no. 4 (1996): 550–53.
5. André Magnan, “Farmland Investment and Financialization in Saskatchewan, 2003–2014: An Empirical Analysis of Farmland Transactions,” Journal of Rural Studies 54 (2017): 322–31.
6. E. Bowers, A Short History of U.S. Agricultural Trade Negotiations (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1989), https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/41764/54007_ages8923.pdf?v=63635.
7. Christopher B. Barrett and Daniel G. Maxwell, “PL480 Food Aid: We Can Do Better,” Choices 19, no. 3 (2004), https://www.choicesmagazine.org/2004-3/2004-3-12.pdf; OECD, The Development Effectiveness of Food Aid (Paris: OECD, 2005), https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2006/05/the-development-effectiveness-of-food-aid_g1gh6804/9789264013476-en.pdf.
8. “We Made a Devil’s Bargain: Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Role in Destroying Haiti’s Rice Crop,” Democracy Now!, April 1, 2010, https://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/1/clinton_rice; Jarrett Renshaw, “U.S. Rice Exports to Haiti Have Unhealthy Levels of Arsenic, Study Finds,” Reuters, February 24, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-rice-exports-haiti-have-unhealthy-levels-arsenic-study-finds-2024-02-24/.
9. S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Ethanol and a Changing Agricultural Landscape (Washington, DC: USDA ERS, 2010), https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/46301/9206_err86_reportsummary.pdf?v=41084.
10. S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Lifecycle Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Renewable Fuel Standard,” accessed March 13, 2026, https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard/lifecycle-analysis-greenhouse-gas-emissions-under-renewable-fuel-standard.
11. Timothy Searchinger et al., “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases through Emissions from Land-Use Change,” Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1238–40, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1151861; Lark et al., “Environmental Outcomes.”
12. National Farmers Union, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF): A Critical Analysis, with a Focus on Agriculture, Land, and Food (Saskatoon: NFU, 2024), https://www.nfu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sustainable-Aviation-Fuel-NFU-for-website.pdf; Thorsten Arnold, “Is Corn Ethanol a Good Strategy to Reduce Ontario’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?” com, November 6, 2023, https://thorstenarnold.com/corn-ethanol-ontario/.
13. J. Deaton et al., “A Survey of Literature Examining Farmland Prices,” Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics 71, no. 4 (2023): 481–506, https://doi.org/10.1111/cjag.12307; Tomaso Ferrando, “The Financialization of Land and Agriculture,” in Global Food Value Chains and Competition Law, ed. Gabriela Steier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/38645C2C563743D46797DDE3090A1B33/9781108429498c3_55-72.pdf/the-financialization-of-land-and-agriculture.pdf.
14. S. Department of Agriculture, “USDA Joins Government-Wide Sustainable Aviation Fuels Grand Challenge,” September 9, 2021, https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2021/09/09/usda-joins-government-wide-sustainable-aviation-fuels-grand-challenge; U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Releases Final Rules to Expand Access to Clean Fuels Production Credit,” January 2025, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1998.
15. Jarrett Renshaw, “Biden Team Sets Out Path for Ethanol Aviation Fuel Subsidies,” Reuters, April 30, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/biden-team-sets-out-ethanols-path-aviation-fuel-subsidies-2024-04-30/; Jarrett Renshaw, “Little to No Ethanol Will Qualify for U.S. Aviation Fuel Credit,” Reuters, May 30, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/little-no-ethanol-will-qualify-us-aviation-fuel-credit-2024-05-30/.
16. Lark et al., “Environmental Outcomes.”
17. Willard W. Cochrane, The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance: A Sustainable Solution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
18. Alexandra Rissing, “We Feed the World: The Political Ecology of the Corn Belt’s Driving Narrative,” Journal of Political Ecology 28, no. 1 (2021): 460–80, https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/2959/galley/3051/view/; Thorsten Arnold, “Narrative Networks in the Canadian Industrial Food System,” com, June 7, 2023, https://thorstenarnold.com/narrative-networks/.
19. Iowa Cancer Registry, Cancer in Iowa 2025.
20. Thorsten Arnold, “Beyond Production: Reclaiming Landscapes as Commons,” com, February 6, 2026, https://thorstenarnold.com/beyond-production-narrative-reclaiming-landscapes-as-commons/.
21. John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Episode 20, summarized in Mark Mulvey, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 20,” Medium, 2021, https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-20-22db108d7dfb.
22. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

Selected References

Barrett, Christopher B., and Daniel G. Maxwell. “PL480 Food Aid: We Can Do Better.” Choices 19, no. 3 (2004). https://www.choicesmagazine.org/2004-3/2004-3-12.pdf.

Bowers, D. E. A Short History of U.S. Agricultural Trade Negotiations. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1989. https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/41764/54007_ages8923.pdf?v=63635.

Bowers, D. E., W. D. Rasmussen, and G. L. Baker. History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933–84. Agricultural Information Bulletin no. 485. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1984. https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/41988/50846_aib485a.pdf.

Cochrane, Willard W. Farm Prices: Myth and Reality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.

Cochrane, Willard W. The Curse of American Agricultural Abundance: A Sustainable Solution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Deaton, B. J., et al. “A Survey of Literature Examining Farmland Prices.” Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics 71, no. 4 (2023): 481–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/cjag.12307.

Ferrando, Tomaso. “The Financialization of Land and Agriculture.” In Global Food Value Chains and Competition Law, edited by Gabriela Steier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/38645C2C563743D46797DDE3090A1B33/9781108429498c3_55-72.pdf/the-financialization-of-land-and-agriculture.pdf.

Iowa Cancer Registry. Cancer in Iowa 2025. Iowa City: State Health Registry of Iowa, 2025. https://shri.public-health.uiowa.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/cancer-in-iowa-2025.pdf.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Lark, Tyler J., et al. “Environmental Outcomes of the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101084119.

Levins, Richard A. “The Treadmill Revisited.” Land Economics 72, no. 4 (1996): 550–53.

Magnan, André. “Farmland Investment and Financialization in Saskatchewan, 2003–2014: An Empirical Analysis of Farmland Transactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 54 (2017): 322–31.

National Farmers Union. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF): A Critical Analysis, with a Focus on Agriculture, Land, and Food. Saskatoon: NFU, 2024. https://www.nfu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Sustainable-Aviation-Fuel-NFU-for-website.pdf.

OECD. The Development Effectiveness of Food Aid. Paris: OECD, 2005. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2006/05/the-development-effectiveness-of-food-aid_g1gh6804/9789264013476-en.pdf.

Paarlberg, Robert. The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61644/chapter/539904003.

Renshaw, Jarrett. “Biden Team Sets Out Path for Ethanol Aviation Fuel Subsidies.” Reuters, April 30, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/biden-team-sets-out-ethanols-path-aviation-fuel-subsidies-2024-04-30/.

Renshaw, Jarrett. “Little to No Ethanol Will Qualify for U.S. Aviation Fuel Credit.” Reuters, May 30, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/little-no-ethanol-will-qualify-us-aviation-fuel-credit-2024-05-30/.

Renshaw, Jarrett. “U.S. Rice Exports to Haiti Have Unhealthy Levels of Arsenic, Study Finds.” Reuters, February 24, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-rice-exports-haiti-have-unhealthy-levels-arsenic-study-finds-2024-02-24/.

Rissing, Alexandra. “We Feed the World: The Political Ecology of the Corn Belt’s Driving Narrative.” Journal of Political Ecology 28, no. 1 (2021): 460–80. https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/2959/galley/3051/view/.

Searchinger, Timothy et al. “Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases through Emissions from Land-Use Change.” Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1238–40. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1151861.

U.S. Department of Agriculture. “USDA Joins Government-Wide Sustainable Aviation Fuels Grand Challenge.” September 9, 2021. https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2021/09/09/usda-joins-government-wide-sustainable-aviation-fuels-grand-challenge.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. Ethanol and a Changing Agricultural Landscape. Washington, DC: USDA ERS, 2010. https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/publications/46301/9206_err86_reportsummary.pdf?v=41084.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Releases Final Rules to Expand Access to Clean Fuels Production Credit.” January 2025. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1998.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Lifecycle Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Renewable Fuel Standard.” Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.epa.gov/renewable-fuel-standard/lifecycle-analysis-greenhouse-gas-emissions-under-renewable-fuel-standard.

Vervaeke, John. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Episode 20. Summarized in Mark Mulvey, “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Ep. 20.” Medium, 2021. https://markmulvey.medium.com/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-by-john-vervaeke-ep-20-22db108d7dfb.