Who you callin' chicken?

Poor little guys, free ranging about, waiting for their dinners.

Today the NCC—that's the U.S. National Chicken Council, not to be confused with this NCC, this NCC or this NCC—said it is seeing ‘severe harm’ from the U.S. ethanol mandate.

According to the chicken group, U.S. governmental subsidies for corn ethanol are the culprits behind the ‘severe harm’ to the broiler chicken industry—a chicken that is raised specifically for meat production, a.k.a. the Cornish-Rocks bird, not to be confused with actual chicken broilers (ewwww...)

It's upset about the ever-increasing price of corn (collectively chicken farmers bought 1.3 billion bushels in 2007).

The clucking group claims it is "among the sectors that are paying the price for the existence of this artificial [i.e. ethanol] market."

The price of corn has skyrocketed since 2006. Corn traded at about $2.22 per bushel on major exchanges in August, 2006 and to $3.40 by April 2007. When the U.S. House of Representatives passed an energy bill nearly doubling the RFS, or ethanol mandate, in December 2007, the price of corn promptly shot up and hasn't come down.

Corn is now trading around $7 a bushel, the highest level ever reached in the U.S.