AgroterrorismAgroterrorism a serious risk to Americans, U.S. economy: Experts

The word “terrorism” is typically associated with bomb and bullets, but security experts say that there are other types of terrorism which may bring death and disruption, chief among them is agroterrorism.

 Agroterrorism is the use of animal or plant pathogens to disrupt a nation’s food supply, or use the food supply to spread deadly disease.

Outbreak News Today notes that the term “agroterrorism” may be relatively new, but the practice is not. During the First World War, Germany used microbes to poison the feed given to the horses, mules, and donkeys of the Allied armies, in many cases disrupting the logistical efforts of the Allies, efforts which still depended on these animals for hauling supplies.

In 1984, the Rajneeshee cult poisoned hundreds of people in Oregon by infecting salad bars in ten restaurants with salmonella. The Rajneeshee were hoping to get their candidate elected to the city council, and their plan was to lower the number of non-Rajneeshee voters by poisoning them.

Agroterrorism poses a serious risk to the people and the economy of the target country, yet the agriculture and food sectors of most countries are unprotected. This is the case in the United States, leading  Tommy Thompson, then secretary of Health and Human Services, to say in 2004 that, “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.”

A recent study by Stanford University researchers concluded that terrorists could poison hundreds of thousands of school children by putting botulism into a tanker of milk for schools. Some deadly plant germs could be sprayed over crops.

In 2001 the U.K. health authorities ordered the killing of 3.9 million heads of cattle in a desperate effort to contain the spread of a foot-and-mouth disease and save the country’s beef industry. The 2001 outbreak in the United Kingdom occurred naturally, but terrorists, too, can infect a few heads of cattle with the foot-and-mouth pathogen and start an epidemic.

The prevention of agroterrorism would not be easy, because food production takes place over vast, sprawling areas which are impossible to protect effectively. The problem becomes even more complicated in a globalized world economy, in which food and food ingredients are imported from countries in which health and safety standards are low or non-existent.

But some do something about the problem. In 2011 the European Union has launched PLANTFOODSEC program, which employs epidemiological and food and crop biosecurity measures to analyze the risks to the European food system from the intentional application of pathogens and disease agents into the European food system.

In the United States after the 9/11 attacks, project BioShield was introduced to detect biological attacks on major urban centers. The USDA helped fund the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium to increase awareness of the threat of agroterrorism and help in preparing for it. The program aims to educate first responders about what to do in the event of a terrorist attack on the domestic food supply, and also to try to prevent it by educating farmers in areas such as California’s Salina Valley, the “Salad Bowl of the World,” to be watchful and alert.