Scaling up US corn production to meet 2022 biofuel mandates would raise nitrogen runoff into the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers by 10 to 34 percent, according to a study released in March 2008. The research, modeled by geographer Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin, put the probability of the United States missing its own Gulf of Mexico cleanup targets at more than 95 percent.
The Gulf dead zone, first documented roughly 30 years ago, now covers up to 20,000 square kilometers each summer. Nitrogen fertilizers from cornfields in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin drain into the Mississippi, where they become nitrates that feed algae blooms. The algae decompose on the seabed, consuming dissolved oxygen and suffocating bottom-dwelling species; fish migrate when they can.
The United States already produces about half of the world's corn supply, mostly for livestock feed and ethanol. The authors concluded that cutting nitrate pollution while still hitting ethanol targets would require farmers to stop raising meat animals on corn and to make sweeping changes to agricultural management.
Donner described the conflict as "an equity problem," pollution from one part of the country damaging another. Oxygen in the dead zone already falls to two parts per million or below, wiping out commercial and sport fishing, yet corn's economic weight far outpaces the fishery's in policy calculations.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in March 2008, in its own words.