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CFDC member David Hallberg, President of Prime BioSolutions, responded to a recent Time Magazine article dealing with food prices by chastising the magazine for neglecting to admit their error of a year ago when they blamed ethanol and biofuels for price increases. With grain prices plummeting while ethanol production increases, Hallberg notes the high energy costs and speculators that were really to blame.
Small wonder that Americans’ opinion of their institutions, including one of democracy’s most important—the press—continues to decline. Even once trustworthy news organizations like TIME seem to have lost their moral compass. Last year, TIME’s cover featured stories by Michael Grunwald, who breathlessly attributed soaring food prices and worsening global hunger primarily to the expansion of the US ethanol industry, while ignoring or minimizing facts that pointed to the real factors, especially soaring energy costs and hedge fund speculators. Now, one year later, TIME’s cover features Bryan Walsh’s dire predictions on “The Real Costs of Cheap Food”, taking us from one extreme to other in less than 365 days. However, not surprisingly, TIME makes no mention of the fact that even though US ethanol production increased by nearly 800 million gallons over that same period, grain prices are nevertheless plummeting to levels well below farmers’ cost of production. Shockingly, TIME seems content to gloss over the fact it badly missed the mark, and has no qualms with leaving their readers with a false impression of the truth.
The pursuit of the perfect is the enemy of the good. American production agriculture has made enormous strides in recent decades, and its unmatched productivity enables it to feed Americans and much of the world, sometimes in excess. No doubt there is room for improvement, and those of us who watch closely know America’s farmers are working hard to be even more efficient, sustainable, and environmentally responsible. However, the path to improvement is made much more difficult when those whose job it is to enlighten the public will not admit when they got it very, very wrong.
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