Another Misleading Report

NOTE: Below is a communication from Professor Thomas R. DeGregori of the University of Houston to Charles M. Benbrook regarding a study of which Benbrook is a co-author. Recently featured in the news, the study claims that organic food contains less pesticide residue than food grown with pesticides. Environmental activists and the media are using this study to claim that organic food is safer than conventionally grown foods. They say this study proves wrong John Stossel's 2000 report on why organic food isn't any safer. DeGregori's letter to Benbrook below reveals that this study, and its media coverage, is seriously flawed.

Benbrook's comments are omitted because Professor DeGregori wanted to respect Benbrook's privacy. However, we welcome Benbrook to offer his own response.

Hi Chuck:

Please re-read my posting. I clearly state -- "I propose that the entire report be obtained along with the press release and the major news stories on it." I am delighted that you "bent over backwards to address clearly the issues involving natural products" and that I and others were responsible for your doing so. My posting was about the coverage in The New York Times, by AP and others and the various press releases including one in which you are quoted and appear to be involved. With the exception of the AP story, all of them unequivocally state that organic products have less pesticide residue than conventionally grown products. I stand by my statement that "anything put on the plant to protect against pests, be it paprika, an herbal mixture, cooked oatmeal (to state the absurd) or a compound of arsenic, copper or sulfur, is a pesticide. This is not a question of science or whether or not the pesticide is or is not benign but of the basic and honest use of the English language."

Not too many of us will be reading your report -- I look forward to doing so. However, a far larger audience will be reading the press accounts and I can expect that the claim of lower levels of pesticide residue in organic produce will be circulating on the Internet for some time to come. Whatever the qualifications that are in the report are lost in the press coverage and the lore and legends that will arise from them. I will do my best to keep an open mind -- face it, we all operate from some degree of closure but we can try to be open -- but I have real doubts that I will find anything there that will warrant the conclusions that I being drawn from it by Kenneth Cook and others.

Kenneth Cook was quick to call John Stossel a liar and repeatedly and persistently demanded that he be fired. As I recall, you posted a note on AgBioView that asked me to read the exchange of letters between EWG and ABC. If you did not say that Stossel lied, you either implied it or came close to doing so. As it turned out, what happened was a miscommunication between the ABC liaison person and the researcher. I am not trying to revive an old controversy but I have to say that I find the continued statement (without any qualifications) by Kenneth Cook and others of "lower levels of pesticide residue" to be misleading if not downright dishonest. The reading public will accept the language in the media to mean what it says and will not be able to judge how well or how poorly that you address the "the issues involving natural products." If in reading your report, I end up agreeing with you on "natural products" (not likely but possible), I would still consider them to be pesticides and therefore would challenge any data that showed lower pesticide residues that did not include them or did not inform the reader that they were being excluded and why. Since some if not all of the press releases are being used to promote organic products and since groups like Kenneth Cook's EWG have close ties to the "organic" food industry, I consider their press release to be a form of deceptive advertising.

Sorry Chuck, I stand by my posting. I recall your infectious laughter when I served on the NAS committee that you chaired for the report for USAID on Sustainable Agriculture. I hope that we can continue the same kind of civility that characterized our differences then and now.

All the best!

Tom DeGregori