Heartland

Foreword

The world is not running out of food, contrary to popular belief. There are vast surpluses of grain in the United States, Canada, Argentina, and several other countries. The United States and the European Common Market don’t know what to do with their mountains of dairy products. But surpluses are concentrated in only a handful of countries; most of the world must import at least part of its food from those few.

We are heading at breakneck speed toward a disaster on another front.

All of the world’s commercial corn is of a series of hybrids. These varieties are used precisely because they are so successful: they grow fast, produce wonderful yields, and have resistances to most diseases bred into them. What cannot be prevented by genetic engineering is controlled by chemical pesticides. As long as each variety is grown in the environment for which it was developed — particular soil, temperature, and moisture conditions — these hybrids are among the miracles of our time.

But hybrids cannot reproduce themselves, so farmers turn every year to the seedsmen who, in effect, control what varieties will be available to them.

If a new, virulent disease were to occur in one of the surplus-producing countries — and I’ve been led by agronomists to believe that such a possibility does exist — the results could be devastating. It’s possible that most of the world’s commercial output of that crop would fail. The consequences are hard to conceive.

Corn is not a major foodstuff to most of humanity. Its importance lies in its use as feed for animals. Our standard diet — beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, butter, cheese — relies on corn-fed animals. A catastrophic failure of our crop would surely result in the almost complete disappearance of these items from the dinner table. And could we live with the fare of starches and vegetables that would have to take their place?

My thanks, for the intriguing idea, to Tom Doherty and Harriet McDougal, who believed not only in me but in the basic human ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps; to Dan Morgan, who wrote the fascinating book Merchants of Grain (Viking Press, 1979); and to a number of grainmen in my home city of Duluth, Minnesota, who showed me the practical side of all this.

September 1982