If you're looking for a booming market, look at the grain used in so many of our foods. The price for corn, for example, has skyrocketed to over $7 a bushel in the past year, and the worldwide buffer supply has shrunk to less than 750 million bushels.
Why does this matter? The company Syngenta wants to market a new, genetically modified corn that will be much easier to make into ethanol. This should drop the cost to produce ethanol, increasing the demand for this new corn. Farmers will have to choose whether to grow ethanol corn or food corn, and this competition could mean higher market costs for foods made with corn.
The National Pork Producers Council is one group concerned that we could already face a corn shortage if the 2011 crop is not up to expectations. Increased world demand and foreign crop shortfalls have already impacted the supply.
The GM corn, called Enogen, was approved for use by the Department of Agriculture over the protests of businesses who were convinced that cross-pollination will result. If the properties of this corn show up in food corn, the North American Millers' Association is concerned that it could "damage the quality of food products like breakfast cereals, snack foods and battered products."
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