Food-Fuel Myths in NY Times Blog Bring on Grower Comments
Posted: September 8, 2007
Corn growers and ethanol supporters are really making their voices heard in comments to the misinformation about food, fuel and ethanol in the New York Times “Wheels” blog post “Ethanol and the Tortilla Tax.” This may have been a totally ignorant article to start with, but you have to be impressed with the forum this creates for debate.
At my last count (noon on 9/8), there were 110 comments on the post - including three of my own. Others include Rick Tolman of the National Corn Growers, Bob Dinneen with the Renewable Fuels Association and Don Hutchens with the Nebraska Corn Growers. But there are many others, including growers themselves, that posted comments defending ethanol and American agriculture. I counted at least 40 positive comments, 27 negative, and about 20 that advocate some other alternative - like sugar, speed limits, hemp, electric, solar, butanol, etc. There are also another 20 or so that I put under the category of “Huh?” that were kind of bizarre or just off subject.
Here are a few examples:
“The critics ignore the production cost of gasoline and raise the issue with ethanol as if it were unique.”
“(Ethanol has) a 105 octane rating and is better than gas.”
“Corn prices have smaller impact on food prices than energy and marketing costs.”
“The price of food is going up so that the U.S. can develop a system of self-sufficient energy production. Is this bad or wrong?”
“What you are seeing is a semi-capitalistic system groping to find a replacement for oil. Give it time to work.”
“The “high” price of corn is not so high, really. A $4 bushel of corn is 56lbs (7 cents a pound).”
“I don’t know if ethanol is the ultimate answer to our energy dilemma, but it’s not a bad short term approach to bridge the gap until something greater is viable, like hydrogen, which none of us is likely to see happen.”
“Bottom line is food prices are not up significantly, no matter what lazy reporters would have us believe.”
“I am sick and tired of the media demonizing corn and the people who grow it….Corn to ethanol is a first step in using renewables to supply part of the world’s growing energy needs. As farmers, we take a balanced approach and provide corn for feed, exports, fuel and for new uses such as biodegradable plastics….As Dwight Eisenhower once said, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a cornfield.”
“Wouldn’t it be great for…the NYTimes to be celebrating our ability to quickly ramp up production of home-grown energy and the positive economic impact for rural America and our environment rather than advancing unfounded and poorly researched opinions?”
“The mistake in this article and other criticisms of using biofuels is that they take the current situation as static, not accounting for the dynamic nature of economic forces and incentives.”
“All in all, I would rather be addicted to American agriculture than addicted to foreign oil.”
“Corn ethanol is not causing one person to starve. It is not taking away one ear of corn on the cob. A very small percentage of the corn grown in this country goes to direct human consumption. That is the FACT. Farm subsidy payments will be the lowest this year that they have been in a long time. Why? Because we have decent prices for farm commodities for the first time in a long time.”
“I think the New York Times stands outside the nearest Holiday Inn Express to hire authors when it comes to writing it’s articles concerning most of its articles about production agriculture.”
“I would rather see a Corn Farmer in Mi, NC, ND, SD get rich, then another family member of the “House of Saud” rack-up another Billion in the Bank of Riyah or Geneva to send their sons of to flight training schools in Fla.”
“Absent from so much of the discussion the media is the impact of ethanol plants on rural communities.”
“The $.51 tax credit (actually , it’s a tax break) goes to the blenders; NOT the farmer and certainly NOT to the ethanol plant.”
“The ethanol industry is in the infancy stage. In the near future, high value products will be made from parts of the corn kernel, and the rest of kernel will be put into ethanol. This technology will make ethanol even more efficient than it is today. In the short term, ethanol is the only solution to our liquid fuel appetite. We need to give it time to develop.”
Great stuff! Keep it up. This is what we need to be doing.
Ron Steenblik (Global Subsidies Initiative) Said,
September 9, 2007 @ 1:26 am
Thank you for bringing my attention to the New York Times article. What is said in the commentaries about subsidies misses the whole point. Every stage of ethanol production is subsidized, from production of the feedstock to the installation of E85 pumps — not just by the federal government, but also by the states. It is easy, but not very convincing, to defend subsidies to biofuels on the argument that everybody gets them. But when one applies common metrics — like $ per MMBtu — the numbers suggest that it is doubtful that any fuels are being as heavily subsidized as biofuels (biodiesel is subsidized at an even higher rate per gallon than ethanol). For more information, see our in-depth study, “Biofuels–At What Cost?”
http://www.globalsubsidies.org/article.php3?id_article=6
By the way, the ethanol industry likes to point out that the $0.51 per gallon volumetric ethanol excise tax credit (VEETC) is paid to blenders, not ethanol producers. That is true, but what it enables them to do is charge a higher price. If the VEETC were irrelevant, than why does the industry fight so hard to keep it in place?