Another "Pit?"

If anyone remembers the Frank Morris novel The Pit, we seem to be entering a phase similar to the one Norris describes in his early 20th-century work, in which commodities traders trade in such things as wheat, for their already-rich clients who often make mere pennies per trade.

The direct parallel that Norris draws is that as greed-driven wheat prices rise — traded ever higher in the Chicago Commodity Exchange — and the rich get richer, the little people who need the bread made from wheat, suffer.

Morris's title refers to the literal trading pit in which brokers work and to the metaphorical pit of despair into which the poor fall as prices and hunger rise. The current parallel is, perhaps, undeniable.

Instead of wheat, however, we have corn's increasing use for biofuel production (principally, Ethanol) driving its price ever higher (250 percent since 2006, by some estimates). Further, corn is already used in so many products (in its syrup and other forms) that our reliance on it as a food is clear.

What effects, then, will commodities brokers and the people for whom they trade, have on corn's price, on its availability as a food source? And might there be another crop — on which we don't rely for food — that could instead serve the biofuel needs of our over-driven nation and leave corn to be used primarily for food?

Sadly, the answer might be seen from the opposite direction: if it was discovered that there was a food that could be made from oil, do you really think a dime would be spent in its development?

Oliver Stone's Gordon Gecko said, "Greed works," but the question is, for whom.