Big Corn Butters Up the 2016 Presidential Hopefuls

It’s been a bad few weeks for corn. On Feb. 26, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania known for fiscal conservatism, and California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to eliminate federal requirements that oil refiners buy corn-based ethanol and blend it into gasoline. “This is the government using corporate welfare to shower money on a favored industry,” Toomey said in a statement. In the House, Virginia Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte introduced legislation in February to cap the amount of ethanol allowed in gasoline. That bill has 43 co-sponsors, including Republicans from Texas and other oil states.

Support for ethanol, a political darling of the past decade, has withered as domestic production of oil and gas has boomed. Critics cite not only government subsidies for the industry but also studies showing that converting corn into ethanol is environmentally harmful. “The worm has turned,” says C. Ford Runge, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota at St. Paul. “There’s a certain amount of embarrassment among politicians that they went down this road so far.”