11/11: Agro Terror Overview (Homeland Security Daily Wire)

Agroterror overview(Homeland Security Daily Wire)

As the attacks of 9/11 showed, terrorism is in large part theatre, so it is natural that attention of security planners should focus most immediately on threats that would satisfy terrorists' desire for spectacle. Yet not all terrorists are like al-Qaeda, and even that group, it is fair to assume, can change its tactics and goals. At the same time, most of the technology developed in the post-9/11 world has focused on these larger threats -- airplane hijacking and radiological bombs first and foremost. The result is an overemphasis on these threats to the near exclusion of others. Of these under-considered vulnerabilities, food safety tops the list.

Unlike a dirty bomb attack, which is much easier to prevent than to mitigate, agroterrorism is best approached as a problem to be stopped after the attack itself has been completed. Due to long supply and manufacturing chains, there are just too many areas of vulnerability to ensure security on the front end. Consider the milk sold in the supermarket. After being extracted from the cow -- who we hope has not been in some way poisoned -- a delivery truck, after making all of its rounds for the day, carries it to the production plant where it is treated and homogenized. Then it is bottled and distributed, often across state lines. Should a terrorist desire to infect the milk supply with ricin, he could do so at various points in the process. Most worrisome of all, if he poisoned the delivery truck, it would be impossible to trace the original source.

A chilling story this week from Canada provides another example. After syringe casings were repeatedly found touching meat at a plant operated by Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, the processing giant was forced to recall large shipments of ham and turkey products. Although no illnesses have been reported, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said it suspects some meat products may have been tampered with an exposed to an ''unknown contaminant.'' In the case of Maple Leaf, the contamination was easily located because the culprit left behind evidence. Yet had the casings gone unnoticed, and had illness resulted, it might have been impossible to tell whether the processing company or the original meat supplier had been at fault. Defending food lines is critical, but it is not anywhere near as easy as defending an airport.

The problems are further compounded by the vastness of the American food industry. In the Mid-Atlantic region alone there are 100,000 farms and nearly 150,000 post-farm businesses. Nationwide, ninety-seven percent of farms are family farms, small and undercapitalized businesses that can ill-afford expensive security, monitoring, and tracking systems. On the other hand, large factory farms are only 3 percent of the total but contribute 40 percent of the output, making them better able to manage security but also prime targets for a massive agroterror attack.

Not that the agriculture industry does not try to play defense. The problem is that it has enemies other than terrorists -- natural enemies such as imported pests and pathogens, as well as a lawsuits stemming from unhygienic practices. These threats are well-known and not at all uncommon, and so the agro-defense industry -- much older than the homeland security industry -- has built up around securing fields from rusts and rots rather than from ricin. Nevertheless, the threat continues to grow in proportion to imports from abroad. In 2005 the United States imported nearly twenty-seven million metric tons of agricultural products, of which significantly less than 5 percent was subjected to thorough inspection. Customs and Border Protection in 2005 seized a daily average of over 1,100 prohibited agricultural products at ports of entry, including 147 agricultural pests. All told, pests and disease cost the industry approximately $3 billion per year, with Asian soybean rust (introduced in 2004) to cost $2 billion alone.

In consideration of these obstacles, the federal government has initiated a number of programs to help get new technologies on the market. The Support Anti-terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act limits civil liability for developers of qualified technologies that protect the nation's food supply. DHS is also starting work on a new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) to support bioforensics, the science of identifying and tracking outbreaks, and in 2004 DHS announced the Regional Technology Integration (RTI) initiative. The latter focuses on regional collaboration and private sector solutions for a range of infrastructure threats, including agriculture.

To our minds, the best thing that could come out of these efforts is a national geographical information system (GIS)-based food tracking system that incorporated data about production and retail distribution for post-attack analysis. Such an approach would take advantage of the RFID sensors now attached to livestock for inventory purposes by attaching new biosensors that will alert food processors to possible contaminates. By layering this data over geographic information related to soils, geology, water resources, and transportation networks, security officials would have the tools to identify likely dispersion patterns and work backwards toward likely contamination sites. One such system is already at work in Kansas, where public health officials have managed to identify prime locations to bury diseased animals in a way that respects state and federal laws and protect water sources and agricultural land from contaminated drainage.