U.S. Food Supply Seen As Vulnerable To Terrorism

For years, security experts have been warning that the nations food supply, often taken for granted, could be among the most significant risks for a terrorist attack.

Imported food makes up a substantial and growing portion of the U.S. food supply and, considering the health and safety concerns of keeping American’s safe, Washington insiders seem oblivious to that part of protecting American citizens.

To ensure imported food safety, federal agencies must focus their resources on high risk foods and coordinate efforts, according to a report released last week by the Government Accountability Office.

The report, submitted to the US Congress and obtained by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, assesses how the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service are addressing challenges in overseeing the safety of imported food.

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Agro-terrorism Threat Is A Real One

An author and terrorism expert says as the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks approaches, Americans need to be aware of the threat of agro-terrorism and the impact it could have on the nation’s food supply. Tim Downs is the author of Ends of the Earth (Thomas Nelson, September 2009), a novel which explores the scenario of a terrorist attack on U.S. farms which contaminates the nation’s food supply. Downs, who has done extensive research on agro-terrorism, says it is especially difficult to defend against.

“The concern about an agricultural act of terrorism is we just can’t defend a thousand-acre farm,” he explains. “You can put up a metal detector in an airport — but how do you protect a thousand acres of corn or wheat?”

Tim Downs (author)The 2007 Christy Award-winning author says this method of terrorism is much cheaper than making a nuke.

“Experts have estimated that for a terrorist group to develop a nuclear weapon could cost them a billion dollars,” Downs notes. “But to develop a very good biological arsenal you would need about ten million dollars and a very small lab and a master’s degree in chemical engineering.”

Downs says more than likely the terrorists would use genetically altered insects to spread pathogens to infest the crops. According to the author, experiments of this kind were conducted by both the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

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HS Today – Study outlines alternative approaches to Agricultual Quarantine Inspections.

When one thinks of border protection thoughts naturally focus on illegal immigration, drugs, and weapons smuggling. A less often acknowledged but equally critically component of border control involves securing the border from invasive micro-organisms.

At United States ports of entry, the contents of air, maritime, truck, and rail cargo, as well as air passenger baggage, vehicles, and mail are subject to Agricultural Quarantine Inspection (AQI) by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Customs and Border Protection officials. The purpose of AQI is to help ensure that United States agriculture is protected from accidentally or intentionally introduced pests and diseases, including the possibility of agroterrorism.

Traditionally inspecting cargo shipments of fruits and vegetables at United States ports has been based on inspecting 2% of the items in a container for the presence of pests, with some allowances for the size, contents, and origin of the container.

A new study, Securing the Border from Invasives: Robust Inspections Under Severe Uncertainty, written by two professors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., L. Joe Moffitt and John K. Stranlund, and Craig D. Osteen, an agricultural economist at the United States Department of Agriculture , argues that current systems are outmoded and badly in need of rethinking.∗

“Although simple to apply,” the study says, current inspection rules “appear not to have any economic content; that is, they does not consider the costs of inspections or the losses of failing to prevent an invasive species from entering the country. Nor do they account for the severe uncertainty associated with infestations in shipping containers and the potential losses from introductions of poorly understood or surreptitiously introduced invasive species.”

The authors propose an alternative set of decision criteria for determining inspection probabilities that incorporate economic considerations with particular emphasis on the severe uncertainties of pest introductions and damage.

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