Also known as a "project" of the Tides Center
1718 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20009
Phone 202-667-6982 | Fax 202-232-2592 | Email info@ewg.org
The organic produce industry has a problem -- several problems, really. Its products cost too much. The U.S. government has said repeatedly that organic foods hold no magical powers or added health benefits, despite old wives’ tales to the contrary. They’re often unsightly, showing the scars of visiting insects that modern agriculture learned how to get rid of decades ago. Then there’s the matter of bacterial contamination. Manure used in organic vegetable growing, says the University of Houston’s Dr. Thomas DeGregori, “may harbor toxic chemicals, viruses, harmful bacteria, insects, worms, or other pests.” Emphasizing that eating organic food could constitute “quite a risk,” Lester Crawford -- the former Director of Georgetown University’s Center for Food and Nutrition Policy -- told Investor’s Business Daily in 1999 that activist groups “need to be scaring us about things like bacteria and viruses in the food, and [instead] they’re still talking about pesticides.” No industry flack, Crawford is a former division head at the USDA and a former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner.
Still, with all of these drawbacks, Americans buy organics in greater numbers every year. Are we that easily led? Are organic marketers that deceptive? This much is sure: the organic food industry is engaging in “black marketing” campaigns against conventional agriculture (and the modern chemistry that makes it possible), while using sloppy and sometimes made-up science to justify the attacks. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is the cauldron where some of the worst science and most creative smear campaigns are cooked up. A web of vested interests including both organic marketers and their public relations operatives reap the benefits of these deceptive advocacy campaigns.
EWG executive director Kenneth Cook has told numerous media outlets — including The New York Times (February 24, 2002) — that he started the Environmental Working Group in 1993. However, published grant records from over a dozen big-money foundations show that EWG was raking in the big bucks as early as 1989. At that time, Cook was vice president of an environmental publishing house called the Center for Resource Economics/Island Press (CRE/IP).
Island Press was originally founded in 1979 by Mellon banking heiress Catherine Conover; it was reorganized in 1984 as the Center for Resource Economics/Island Press, and placed under the leadership of Tides Foundation director Charles Savitt. Drummond Pike, who started the Tides Foundation in 1976, has also been on EWG’s board since the beginning, and is a long time director of CRE/IP as well (he’s currently its treasurer).
Until 1993, Cook and EWG engaged in the questionable (but apparently legal) practice of using CRE/IP’s existing tax exemption as a cover to receive foundation money. In this way, EWG collected over $5 million before 1993, the year Cook claims the organization was founded. In 1993 Cook left CRE/IP and moved EWG under the protective umbrella of the Tides Foundation, an organization that specializes in lending its tax-exempt status to leftist startups that might not satisfy the Internal Revenue Service’s criteria on their own. When the Tides Foundation spun off the “Tides Center” in 1996, EWG was among a few hundred activist groups that were quietly shifted to the new entity. Catherine Conover, while still on CRE/IP’s board, is also among the biggest individual donors to the Tides Foundation/Center complex.
The Environmental Working Group emerged from under the Tides umbrella in 1999 and incorporated in Washington, DC.
EWG’s game plan is simple. It releases “scientific” analyses designed to make the public (especially parents) worry tremendously about tiny amounts of pesticide exposure from fruits and vegetables. Throwing around phrases like “cancer risk” and “nervous system toxicity” attracts press coverage and lends EWG the veneer of scientific respectability. The “Environmental Worrying Group,” as some commentators have dubbed the organization, then goes on to recommend that Americans “buy as much organic food as possible” in order to avoid the supposed health risks associated with these pesky chemicals.
What they’re not telling us, of course, is that most of the pesticides we find on fresh produce are completely natural, and manufactured by plants themselves. In a 1995 interview with Vegetarian Times magazine, the award-winning Berkeley biologist Bruce Ames insisted that “99.99% of the pesticides we eat are naturally present in plants to ward off insects and other predators… Reducing our exposure to the 0.01% of ingested pesticides that are synthetic is not likely to reduce cancer rates.”
And even that small portion of agricultural pesticides that are synthetic have resulted in tremendous gains for humanity, despite the general public anxiety that EWG regularly offers up to the TV ratings gods. Man-made agricultural chemicals have been in use for over 50 years in the United States, and they are among the most rigorously tested and heavily regulated products in our economy. They have undeniably made fresh fruits and vegetables cheaper and more readily available for Americans, especially for the economically disadvantaged. The U.S. Public Health Service says that “such nutritional advances are largely responsible” for much of the 30 years of increased life expectancy that we’ve all gained in the last 100 years.
The Environmental Working Group represents a political movement in the U.S. that wants to dump the world’s finest farming system in favor of organic agriculture, a backward scheme that threatens to build a bridge back to the 19th century. And if the organic food movement succeeds, it will undoubtedly be at great financial cost to U.S. consumers. Those in the organic marketing biz seem to think the more expensive food is, the better off the world is. As Theresa Marquez, marketing director for Organic Valley, has said: “The question is not, why is organic food so expensive. The question is, why are the foods we are eating now so cheap?”
EWG’s scientific reign of error and needless hyperbole includes a wealth of misinformation and seemingly intentional deceit -- all of it calculated to tarnish the public image of agricultural pesticides and promote organic foods as “the solution”:
- While flacking a 1999 report called How ‘Bout Them Apples? (a predictable diatribe warning that a million American kids were in grave danger from chemical residues on apples), EWG’s Todd Hettenbach told United Press International that “just a bite or two of an apple, peach or pear, which had legal residues of [the insecticide] methyl parathion, could cause dizziness, nausea and blurred vision” in a child. One federal EPA consultant told Fox News that Hettenbach’s claims were “totally off the wall.”
- In its 1997 report entitled Tough to Swallow: How Pesticide Companies Profit from Poisoning America’s Tap Water, EWG carped about levels of a herbicide called atrazine in Midwestern water supplies. The federally imposed safety limit for that chemical is 3.0 parts per billion, but EWG claimed that a level of 0.15 parts per billion violated federal safety requirements. When the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency learned that EWG had essentially fabricated its own safety standards, one official remarked: “We’re concerned when reports like this come out because they’re making comparisons based on levels that don’t exist.”
- In 2001, PBS aired a special called "Trade Secrets" that amounted to a one-sided attack on chemical companies. The Environmental Working Group, along with several other eco-activist organizations, formed a campaign called "Coming Clean" to promote the broadcast. Around the same time, according to tort-reform advocate and Manhattan Institute fellow Walter Olson, EWG began advertising itself directly to trial lawyers. The EWG ad ran on an attorney-targeted email service operated by www.findlaw.com, and read: "Thought the Cigarette Papers Were Big? 50 years of internal Chemical Industry documents including thousands of industry meeting minutes, memos, and letters. All searchable online. Everything you need to build a case at www.ewg.org."
- In the spring of 1993, health reporters anxiously awaited the release of a report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which was expected to assess the real-world health risks associated with agricultural pesticides. The report concluded that no new data existed to suggest health hazards from the regulated use of approved chemicals. But the Environmental Working Group took advantage of the press interest in the subject.
- Over the objections of at least one NAS scholar (Dr. John Peter Wargo from Yale University), EWG preempted the scientific panel by a full week with its own news conference, declared that we should “cure America’s addiction to pesticides,” and urged all Americans to “buy only organic food.” Dr. Wargo later called the EWG report “primarily a piece of advocacy… not science.”
- A 1996 project called the “Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce” worried newspaper editors and broadcast producers all across North America when EWG assigned “toxicity scores” to a dozen of the most popular fruits and vegetables. But these alarmist numbers were based on another contrived standard, one that tallied up the number of stray chemicals detected, rather than their total volume or measurable health risk. EWG’s Kenneth Cook released the report in an invitation-only “press conference” where only pre-selected (read: gullible and eco-friendly) reporters were permitted to ask questions.
The EPA was quick to denounce this charade. Spokesman Al Heier said “We set the allowable residue levels, and every test we’ve made indicates they’re well within safety levels.” Paul Lachance, who chaired the food science department at Rutgers University, was more direct, calling the EWG survey “out to lunch.” Lachance told the Bergen County (NJ) Record that pesticide safety levels are set so low that “you’d have to eat truckloads of these foods to have a risk.”
Richard Wiles, the EWG executive who cooked up the 1996 “Shopper’s Guide,” insisted that his intention wasn’t to steer consumers away from fresh produce in general, but he readily admitted an organic agenda. “Our basic recommendation is to buy organic produce whenever you can get it,” he told The Chicago Tribune. But what sort of “experts” are really behind this recommendation? When investigative reporter Matt Labash asked Wiles this very question, he got a surprising answer. “Richard Wiles, the group’s vice president of research,” Labash wrote in The Weekly Standard, “conceded to me that the Environmental Working Group does not have a single doctor or scientist on staff.”
Americans have a remarkable wealth of food choices in the 21st century. Organic produce is just as valid a choice to make as any other, but Americans ought to know what they’re paying extra for. This is where the Environmental Working Group purposely muddies the waters. Anyone leaning toward taking EWG’s reports seriously should consider this August 2000 analysis from New York Times columnist John Tierney:
“Environmentalists routinely advise people to buy organic food and issue estimates on how many Americans are being poisoned by tiny amounts of pesticides. Yet the only victims that can be readily identified are rodents that were fed enormous doses… Scientists can name Americans poisoned by organic lettuce. They may not have the data to know if the organic variety is riskier than conventional lettuce, but they know it’s foolish to assume natural is better. E.coli are natural too.”
The Environmental Working Group likes to advertise that it provides “cutting edge research on health and the environment,” but its pseudo-scientific ruses are generally meant to play into the hands of the multi-billion-dollar organic foods industry. Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin observed in her February 11, 2002, offering that EWG’s agenda (and that of its wealthy financial backers) is “to cripple agribusiness altogether in favor of ‘organic’ alternatives.”
In recent years, EWG has also gotten into the business of direct lobbying, urging Congress in April 2000 to spend taxpayer dollars “to help farmers make the transition to organic farming,” and even to make “environmental stewardship payments… to those who have already made the transition” to organic. This blatant attempt at a federal money-grab for organic agriculture has led some commentators to suggest the obvious: that EWG’s strings are being pulled by a deep-pocketed special interests, not by objective scientists.
The Organic Trade Association (OTA) is that special interest. Organic food marketers made over $12.2 billion in the United States in 2004, and nearly three times that amount worldwide. Despite the image of organic food as an “alternative” hippie-culture lifestyle choice, this is big business. OTA represents more organic businesses than any other trade group.
EWG’s pronouncements about the supposed health advantages of eating organic foods are frequently seconded in OTA press releases. An analysis of online databases reveals over 100 news stories in which OTA president Katherine DiMatteo is quoted alongside one EWG spokesperson or another. More than half of the press conferences held by EWG between 1993 and 2003 featured DiMatteo or another OTA spokesperson right alongside EWG’s “scientific” analysts.
And at least one Organic Trade Association press release in recent years has been issued from the offices of Fenton Communications, the leftist PR firm that brought us the fraudulent Alar-on-apples food scare. EWG is a Fenton client, and David Fenton sits on EWG’s board. Fenton Communications also represents organic marketers (and OTA “members”) Kashi Cereal, Honest Tea, and Rodale Press.
In a remarkably prescient observation, ABC News commentator Tom Foreman told the “Nightline” audience in 1993 that “many producers and marketers of so-called organic foods, those grown with no direct pesticide applications, expect a windfall… Even though pesticide residue can often be found in organic foods, consumer groups are actively spreading the word that organic is better, ultimately safer, and they want consumers to take that message to the cash register.”
Depending on your point of view, much (if not all) of the Environmental “Worrying” Group’s work might constitute a black eye. But a few recent episodes stand out from EWG’s merely duplicitous background noise.
- Lavish praise has been heaped on EWG by dozens of media outlets for its Internet-based farm subsidy database, a free-standing and searchable repository of data which the EWG claims to show USDA crop subsidies for the past five years. EWG’s presentation of this data includes a list of “Farm Subsidy Payments to Fortune 500 companies.” It’s a predictable swipe at corporate America amid the broader insistence that “family farmers” (i.e. those most likely to grow organic produce) receive the lion’s share of federal farm dollars.
There’s only one problem: the data doesn’t necessarily show crop subsidies at all. Take Boise Cascade for example. The U.S. government pays subsidies to growers of only eight commodity crops: oats, wheat, sorghum, peanuts, tobacco, sugar, cotton, and rice. Boise Cascade, as most Americans know, is in the business of growing and harvesting timber for lumber, wood pulp, and paper products. Yet EWG’s database shows a total of $43,690 in “subsidies paid to Boise Cascade” from 1996 to 2000.
Boise Cascade spokesman Ralph Poore told the Center for Consumer Freedom in 2002 that the land parcels described in the USDA database are “old timber land,” and that “payments were made by the USDA for the purpose of taking this land out of crop production.”
There are 15 other major U.S. corporations represented in the EWG “farm subsidy database.” How much of that data has been massaged by EWG staffers in a politically motivated twisting of the truth?
The rest of the database is a mixed bag at best. It includes over 24,000 entries showing negative dollar-amount payments to U.S. farmers -- including dozens over $10,000. These data seem to suggest that farmers are paying Uncle Sam, and not the other way around. It’s enough to make some objective viewers question the integrity of the entire exercise -- or at least to consider the possibility that some of these farm subsidies are being reduced over time.
- A free-market nonprofit in the Pacific Northwest has asked the IRS to strip the Environmental Working Group of its tax-exempt status, arguing that EWG is operating in violation of numerous tax laws by engaging in excessive lobbying. The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) filed the petition on February 8, 2002.
CDFE alleges that EWG functioned as an illegal political action committee, and pressured then-Vice President Al Gore during his unsuccessful 2000 campaign. The IRS petition outlines EWG’s history as a lobbying organization -- which, if true, would put EWG squarely in violation of nonprofit law. EWG is also accused of filing false tax returns.
The most glaring red flag involves a $1.62 million grant made to EWG by the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation in 2000. The tax return filed by the Joyce Foundation candidly describes the grant as a payment made “for work on the 2002 Farm Bill.” To be fair, tax-exempt groups like EWG -- those organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code -- are allowed to do a small amount of lobbying. This is governed by something called the 20-5 rule, which would permit EWG to spend 20 percent of its budget on its own lobbying efforts and another five percent persuading others to do their own lobbying. But CDFE’s Ron Arnold tells a reporter from WorldNet Daily that EWG “far exceeded the 20-5 rule, and they didn’t report it. Those are two very serious offenses.”
Arnold has openly speculated that the Joyce Foundation may have an ulterior motive in funding EWG’s online farm-subsidy database, as reductions in federal cereal subsidies could cripple the U.S. wheat market. The Joyce Foundation, it seems, is heavily invested in Canadian wheat interests. And unlike most other foundations of its size, Joyce allows one set of staffers to make both investment and grantmaking decisions.
- EWG’s web site includes several pages of publicly available political campaign contribution data, cleverly massaged into tables that depict “dirty money from toxics” and “pesticide interests.” The obvious intent is to leave the public with the impression that agricultural chemical manufacturers wield unbelievable power and are in the business of compromising the integrity of federal legislators in order to get their way.
But who qualifies as “toxic”? Close examination reveals that EWG has set the bar remarkably low, assigning that moniker to the Grocery Manufacturers of America, among others. Of the 300+ consumer brands identified on the GMA web site, fewer than 25 have anything to do with agricultural chemicals.
And who qualifies as a pesticide-pusher? In addition to the trade associations that actually represent agrochemical marketers, EWG apparently thinks that political contributions from “State and National Farm Bureaus” should be regarded as “dirty money.” EWG’s sole criterion seems to be “organic vs. conventional,” which is no great surprise.
Regardless of EWG’s contrived standards, most of the three-year totals amount to less than $100,000. When compared to its own $1.62 million grant from the Joyce Foundation in 2000, EWG’s concern for the corrupting influence of big money seems ironically misplaced.
- In a widely publicized June 2001 battle with ABC News, EWG tried desperately to sabotage “Tampering With Nature,” a news magazine segment broadcast by its arch-nemesis John Stossel. As the Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote, a small part of the program “had Stossel demonstrating through interviews with California children that school kids are being brainwashed into believing there is only one side to environmental debates. The EWG does not want the public to see this.”
The New York Observer offered this explanation of the series of events which led to some of the children’s parents insisting that their kids not appear on camera with Stossel: “ABC News countered that none of these parents complained about Mr. Stossel’s role during the interviews, and only did so after hooking up with the publicity-savvy Environmental Working Group.” The Baltimore Sun said that “the group [EWG] exquisitely timed the parents’ strike to undermine Stossel.”
Stossel is one of the few marquee television reporters who won’t take EWG’s radical pronouncements at face value. EWG president Kenneth Cook has publicly called for his head on several occasions. “If they can silence him,” says the Sun-Sentinel, “there will be no one of such prominence on TV to challenge them.”
