Agroterror overview
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 unhygenic 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.
-read more in Shawn Hutchinson’s Directions Magazine report ; see also Kevin Coleman’s “Bioterrorism and the Food Supply” Directions Magazine report (1 October 2004)
