Dennis Avery

Learn more from the Center for Media and Democracy's research on climate change.

Dennis Avery is the director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute think tank, where he edits Global Food Quarterly. Avery crusades against organic agriculture, claiming that modern industrial agriculture and biotechnology will save the world from starvation and disaster. Avery also disputes the scientific consensus on global warming, ascribing the warming to "sunspots," purportedly based on information about ice cores and deep ocean sediment deposits. He now subscribes to the global cooling meme, saying on July 14 2008 "Unstoppable warming has gone and a cooling phase has begun that is likely to last 25 to 30 years". He is also the originator of a controversial organic foods claim that organic foods are more dangerous than foods sprayed with chemical pesticides.

Avery is a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009), a skeptics' event organized by the Heartland Institute think tank.

Background

Avery's training is in agricultural economics. He served as a senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. Department of State for between 1980 and 1988 under the Reagan administration, "where he was responsible for assessing the foreign-policy implications of food and farming developments worldwide. ... As a staff member of the President's National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber, he wrote the Commission's landmark report, 'Food and Fiber for the Future.'"

According to his biographical note, "Avery travels the world as a speaker, has testified before Congress, and has appeared on most of the nation's major television networks, including a program discussing the bacterial dangers of organic foods on ABC's 20/20."

Avery is also a member of the scientific policy advisory panel for the corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health. Avery writes a weekly column for The BridgeNews Forum.

Books, articles and presentations by Avery

• Global Food Progress, Hudson Institute, 1991.
• Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming, Hudson Institute, 1995. (A second edition was published in 2000).
• A list of articles by Dennis Avery is available here.
• Dennis Avery, "Food Product Demand and the Safety/Security of Food Supplies (Presentation)", 41st Missouri Governors Conference on Agriculture, St Louis, Missouri, January 7-8, 2008.
• Dennis Avery, "Food Product Demand and the Safety/Security of Food Supplies (Audio MP3)", 41st Missouri Governors Conference on Agriculture, St Louis, Missouri, January 7-8, 2008.
• Dennis Avery, "A Bad Time For Organic Believers", Center for Global Food Issues, October 3, 2006.
• Dennis Avery, "Predicting 21st Century Global Warming with the 1,500-year Climate Cycle", Presentation to the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (2009), March 9, 2009. (PowerPoint)

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Global warming skeptics
• Heartland Institute
• Hudson Institute
• International Conference on Climate Change (2009)

External resources

• Center for Global Food Issues, "Dennis Avery", accessed January 2004.

External articles

• Dennis Avery's work debunked on Deconstructing Dinner, "A Primer on Pesticide Propaganda II (Audio)" "(Transcript)", April 2009
• GM Watch, "Dennis Avery: big daddy of E.co-lie", accessed January 2004.
• Karen Charman, "Force Feeding Genetically Engineered Foods, PR Watch, Fourth Quarter 1999.
• Karen Charman, Saving the Planet with Pestilent Statistics, PR Watch, Fourth Quarter 1999.
• J. Robert Hatherill, Ph.D, and Jeff Nelson, "Organics: The Blurred Vision of ABC's 20/20".
• American Council on Science and Health, Board of Scientific and policy advisors", accessed January 2004.