Responding to another Dennis Avery viewpoint

Don Hutchens, executive director of the Nebraska Corn Board, has written a viewpoint that will appear in the April 13 edition of Feedstuffs.

It is in response to another viewpoint written by Dennis Avery. I say 'another' because Avery also penned the piece blaming corn and ethanol for the crash of Flight 1549 into the Hudson River (check that out here).

Avery's March 30th viewpoint in Feedstuffs, "Will future generations be left powerless?", can be found on his website here.

Below is a piece of Hutchen's response. For the full reply, click here.

It is amazing to those of us in the corn industry how an educated economist just can’t get the math right. Avery states: "Ethanol is already gobbling up 1/3 of our nation’s corn for its 1% energy, and doubling that will redouble food prices." ...

People and organizations like Dennis Avery, PETA, HSUS and the Grocery Manufacturers Association should take greater care before they criticize production agriculture while there mouth is full with the cheapest, most abundant and safest food supply in the world.

For the record, U.S. corn supply (total available) in 2007-08 was 14.3 billion bushels of which 21% was used to supply the ethanol industry, and if you credit back the amount of corn that came back out for distillers grains, then we only used 14.7% of our true corn supply for ethanol alone. ...

I know it was much easier and dramatic for Avery, an economist, to just round up to 33% of nation’s corn crop going to ethanol, but every time I tried that rounding up idea in my math classes it normally got me a wrong answer and a poor grade.

Lastly, Avery wants you to believe that the nation’s corn crop only represents a 1% energy value and that corn to ethanol doubles your food prices. Again let’s get the facts straight or at least give agriculture a little more credit.

In 2007-08 the U.S. used 137 billion gallons of gasoline, and we replaced a portion (6.28%) of that with 8.6 billion gallons of ethanol; while ethanol will never replace all the gasoline we use, it’s sure a heck of lot more than the 1% that Avery leads you to believe, and has potential to be much more. ...

And, let’s be clear, this idea of corn/ethanol “doubling or redoubling” (Avery’s words) food prices is nonsense or we would be seeing consumer food prices plummeting. Corn prices, along with most other commodity prices, are anywhere from 30-45% less than their highs of last year and yet food prices for many products have yet to drop.