Benbrook spent 18 years working in Washington, DC, on agricultural policy and regulation. During this time, he served for two years as the director of the Subcommittee on Department Operations, Research, and Foreign Agriculture of the U.S. House of Representatives. He also directed the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Agriculture from 1984 to 1990. On a 1993 Frontline program entitled "In Our Children's Food," which focused on a NAS report on pesticides of which Benbrook was the lead author, he warned that the regulatory limits on pesticides were based on adults, even though they are more dangerous to children. He also suggested that he had been fired from the NAS panel for criticizing the pesticide industry. Benbrook served as chief scientist at the Organic Center, an organic industry funded nonprofit organization, from 2004 until 2012. Between 2012 and 2015, Benbrook was the research professor at Washington State University for the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. Here he conducted several studies funded entirely by the organic food industry, who also paid for his trips to Washington where he lobbied for requiring a label on genetically modified organisms.
Research
One of Benbrook's best-known studies is one published in 2012, funded by the organic industry, which concluded that genetically modified foods have resulted in increased pesticide use, purportedly because weeds are developing resistance to glyphosate. However, some critics stated this study was flawed, because Benbrook did not take into account the fact that glyphosate is less toxic than other herbicides, thus the net toxicity may decrease even as the total herbicide use increases. In addition, Graham Brookes, co-director of PG Economics, a company providing services to agri-technology companies, accused Benbrook of making subjective estimates of herbicide use because the data provided by the National Agricultural Statistics Service doesn't distinguish between genetically modified and non-genetically modified crops. Brookes had published a study whose conclusions contradicted those of Benbrook's earlier in 2012. Brookes also stated that Benbrook had made "biased and inaccurate" assumptions. More recently, in December 2013, Benbrook was the lead author of a study which reported that organic milk contained significantly higher levels of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. The study was funded in part by the organic milk producer Organic Valley, although Allison Aubrey of NPR reported that they had no role in the study's design or analysis. In July 2014, Benbrook was a co-author on a meta-analysis of 343 studies examining the nutritional differences between organic and non-organic food. It concluded that organic food had higher levels of antioxidants and lower levels of cadmium, but also lower levels of protein than did conventional food.
Views
Genetically modified food
Benbrook was a signatory on a 2013 statement issued by the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility which asserted that there is no consensus on the safety of genetically modified food. He has said this statement was motivated in part by I-522, a bill introduced in Washington state that year. When contacted by Seattle Weekly, Benbrook also said that he thinks that "...technology that alters the composition of food could lead to problems beyond science’s ability to predict." He gave an address to a National Research Council study group on genetically modified foods in September 2014. In his address, he argued that the reason many people are not confident in the safety of genetically modified foods is that the regulatory systems in place rely too much on studies supplied by companies that develop such foods.
Pesticides
Benbrook criticized a 2012 paper which concluded that organic food did not confer significant health advantages relative to conventional food. In a letter to the Annals of Internal Medicine, he wrote that their finding of a 30 percent "risk difference" between organic and conventional food was misleading, because the metric does not refer to health risk, and that pesticide risk is a function of many other factors in addition to contamination. In 2015, Benbrook and Philip Landrigan co-authored a perspective piece in the New EnglandJournal of Medicine urging the United States government to conduct new assessments of the safety of glyphosate, which had been declared a probable human carcinogen earlier that year.
