Excuse me. Perhaps I’m thick, but what does a generalised price rise have to do with ‘’enlarging your markets’’?
Nothing, really.
The USDA, government, etc were advocating that farmers find “new markets” and “enlarge their markets” for existing commodities in the 90’s.
Corn (and other grain commodities) were holding constant prices since the 80’s, while inflation was hollowing out farmers’ real returns.
So the USDA kept touting this “free trade,” “increased exports,” “new markets” blah, blah, blah for years. YEARS. A decade, actually, we were hearing this pap.
As part of this, farmers started turning corn into ethanol. Then when MTBE was found to be problematic and environmentalists still insisted on an oxygenate in gasoline, the farm groups got ethanol switched in instead of MTBE. Enlarged markets, after all.
Now people are hysterically blaming ethanol for all commodity price increases, when the USDA report this very morning shows what the reality is: world demand is outstripping world supply. Period, end of story. Everything else is trimmings.