Dave Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor

Back in 1895, Katharine Lee Bates was teaching English at a college in Colorado when she wrote this first stanza of a poem that became the lyrics for the song “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

Reading about global food issues, most notably rising prices paid by consumers around the world, prompts this probably overheated question: Might America wake one day and discover that those “amber waves of grain” and the bounty of its “fruited plain” no longer is enough to feed its citizens?

American farmers were forecast this spring to plant more than 92 million acres of corn, 75 million acres of soybeans and 58 million acres of wheat. Every bushel that survives to be harvested this fall will be coveted. The United States accounts for more than half of the world’s grain exports; by comparison, a higher percentage than Saudi Arabia’s share of global oil exports.

South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain supply, already buys large amounts of from the United States. A desire to ensure the imports it needs has moved the government in Seoul to create a mechanism that could bypass a competitive marketplace. By 2020, South Korea hopes to import 4 million metric tons of corn and wheat annually, some 30 percent of its import needs, contracting directly with the source.

Lester Brown, founder of the WorldWatch Institute, earlier this year wrote about this development, as part of a larger piece titled "The New Geopolitics of Food." “As the Koreans acquire their own grain elevators, they may well sign multiyear delivery contracts with farmers, agreeing to buy specified quantities of wheat, corn, or soybeans at a fixed price,” Brown wrote in Foreign Policy.

Surely, Brown observed, “Other importers will not stand idly by as South Korea tries to tie up a portion of the U.S. grain harvest even before it gets to market.” If the South Koreans do this, he said, the Chinese, the Indians and others will follow, paying top dollar and removing significant quantities of American grain from the marketplace. Brown also pointed out that such more affluent countries as Saudi Arabia, South Korea and China increasingly are leasing or buying land outside of their borders, notably in Africa, on which to grow food for their domestic consumption.

Brown previously had suggested that, given China's role as an engine in the world economy,   the United States might find it difficult to restrict grain exports should the People’s Republic want to make particularly large purchases.

In his Foreign Policy article, Brown posited that Americans could wake up some day and discover that there no longer is enough grain available to meet the demand in this country for food, feed and fuel (such as corn used in the production of ethanol, by itself a major subject of debate in the world of global agriculture).

“This is happening just as China may be on the verge of entering the U.S. market as a potentially massive importer of grain. With China's 1.4 billion increasingly affluent consumers starting to compete with U.S. consumers for the U.S. grain harvest, cheap food, seen by many as an American birthright, may be coming to an end,” Brown wrote.

TIME magazine noted this trend in a piece outlooking “A Future of Price Spikes.” “With demand steadily rising, the world is closer to disaster because the food safety net has shrunk. In the late 1990s, we had enough corn stashed in reserve to meet world demand for about four months; now we have enough for only about 12/3. From more than four months' supply of wheat in storage, we have gone down to just over three (and in recent years, reserves have fallen even further),” TIME reported.

As to that comparison of U.S. grain exports with Saudi Arabian oil exports: Given the implications of demand outstripping supply, the question has been raised in recent years whether the U.S. government should maintain a strategic grain reserve, akin to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve used to cushion severe shocks to oil supplies.

Therein lies the Biblical story of Joseph, who interpreted the Pharoah’s dream about seven fat cows and seven lean cows to mean that seven years of plenty in Egypt would be followed by seven years of famine, for which Joseph recommended that the Pharoah save a portion of the harvest in the good years to feed the people in the years to follow.

At one time, the U.S. government did maintain physical reserves of grain, but today opts instead to hold cash reserves should it need to buy grain in the event of a crisis. Joseph W. Glauber, chief economist of the Agriculture Department, told CNN that removing grain from the marketplace for a strategic reserve or for other policy purposes raises issues of government intervention in the marketplace. As an example, Glauber cited a short-lived embargo on U.S. soybean exports in the early 1970s, one part of a larger Nixon administration anti-inflation strategy. The embargo’s “unintended consequences,” as Glauber termed them, included Brazil and Argentina expanding soybean production to take advantage of import demands the U.S. could not fill and the European Union “embarked on a ‘self-sufficiency’ policy for oilseed production.”

The National Family Farm Coalition, which bills itself as a “North American organization that serves as a national link for grassroots organizations working on family farm issues,” believes a strategic grain reserve is needed to prevent livestock feed costs from escalating beyond a reasonable price, “preserve our national security” by making sure there is sufficient grain for use by Americans and make sure farmers can cope with boom-and-bust cycles in the prices they receive.

China, the world’s most populous nation and the world’s largest wheat producer, maintains a national reserve, because “Food security is national security in China,” Jim Harkness wrote in a piece for the Institute for Policy Studies, the implication being that perhaps it is less of a national security priority in the United States. Harkness added, “Although China maintains vast reserves of grain, and other foods as well like pork and edible oils, the United States and most other countries have abandoned this wise approach,” Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, added.

In the years to come, the demands and diet of a growing global population – expected to reach 7 billion in late October – may well test the reassurance that Marri Carrow, communications manager for the U.S. Grains Council, offered CNN: “The U.S. farmer has an amazing ability to plant enough coarse grains to meet both domestic and international demand.”

Dave Schechter

Senior National Editor

We hear a lot these days about the American dream; that it’s over, that it’s out of reach.

Consider the title of a report from the Pew Economic Mobility Project: “Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream.”

Consider this statement from a report by the New America Foundation titled “Losing Middle America”: “America’s existing social contract is inadequate for more and more Americans. While the Great Recession and the housing bubble implosion destroyed the savings of many middle and lower income families and caused mass unemployment, a number of longer term trends have also contributed to the woes of Americans. Stagnating wages, shrinking retirement savings and the loss of defined-benefit plans, rising health care costs that eat into discretionary income, easy credit used to maintain living standards and the subsequent exploding debt of the middle class, and most importantly, fewer decent jobs, have all chipped away at hopes for a better future.”

Two surveys conducted in March of this year measured attitudes toward the American Dream.

In a survey of 1,000 adults age 18 and older with a child under age 18, conducted for the insurance company New York Life, only 41 percent thought that American children will have a better standard of living than their parents.

When the Pew Economic Mobility Project surveyed 2,000 adults, 37 percent said they expected to “reach, as you define it, the American Dream, in your lifetime;” 27 percent did not expect to, 31 percent said they already had and 6 percent were unsure. When asked whether their children “will have a higher standard of living than you did,” 47 percent said yes, down from 62 percent who said yes when the same question was asked two years earlier.

Could the outlook be bleaker? If anything, the American dream holds that the future will be better than today.

Of course, the American dream means something different to each of us. It’s an idea, an image we have in our minds.

It’s a lifestyle, the way you want to live, if not now then in the future. It may be the type of job you want or the kind of neighborhood where you want to live; the model of car that you drive, the vacations you take or the type of schools your children attend. Or maybe it’s something broader, having to do with the values and ideals you hope permeate American society.

If you’ve wondered about the origin of the term “American dream,” it’s attributed to writer and historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book “The Epic of America.”

Adams’ is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. . . . The American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class."

But 80 years later . . .

“The American Dream is being transformed into an absolute nightmare,” Michael Snider wrote in the Business Insider.  “Most of us grew up believing that if we worked really hard in school and that if we stayed out of trouble and that if we did everything that "the system" told us to do that there would be a place for us in the middle class too. Well, it turns out that "the system" is breaking down. There aren't enough good jobs for all of us anymore. In fact, there aren't very many crappy jobs either. Millions are out of work, millions have lost their homes and nearly all of the long-term economic trends just keep getting worse and worse.”

“So is there any hope for the U.S. middle class? No, there is not,” Snider concluded.

“It’s part of a larger phenomenon, of a decline of faith in the American Dream,” said Anya Kamenetz, author of the books “Generation Debt” and “DIY U.” “Homeownership has taken a huge blow, people are questioning the value of a college education, and the idea that America will always be economically dominant is fading away. The assumption of an ever-increasing standard of living is no longer taken for granted . . . There’s little doubt this is going to be the first generation to not do as well materially as their parents.”

“And for my own kids," Kamenetz said, "I don’t necessarily expect them to be highly successful according to the old models. But hopefully I’ll instill them with values that will make them happier.”

That may be the best many of us can hope to do.