The notion that
America Feeds The World is largely a myth, anyway, perpetuated by industrial agriculture as a defense in using large-scale, technology-driven agriculture (including pesticides and genetically modified seed). American-style farming doesn't really grow food for hungry people. Forty percent of our biggest crop, corn, goes into fuel for cars. Most of the second-biggest crop, soybeans, is fed to animals. It is true that bigger harvests in the U.S. tend to make food more
affordable around the world, supply driving the prices, and of course lower food prices are a good thing for poor people. Chinese pigs, for example, are growing fat on cheap soybean meal grown by farmers in the U.S. and Brazil, and that's one reason why hundreds of millions of people in China are eating much better than a generation or two ago, as they can afford to buy pork. So American farmers who grow soybeans are kind-of-sort-of justified in saying that they help feed the world, but without American soybeans China would just grow their own and it would cost more to buy pork.
The US produces about 10 percent of the world's wheat. We export about 20 of the world's wheat, though, thanks to cheap industrial agricultural practices. Russia exports about thew same or a little bit more of the world's wheat. The US and Russia produce about the same amount of wheat, but India produces a third more than the US, China produces twice what we do, and the EU produces 2.5 times the wheat we do. So they really don't have to deal with us on
anything if they want to eat.
