America’s Fragile Food Supply Chain, Part II
Part II: Agroterrorism Vs. Naturally Occurring Threats
The word Agroterrorism is a relative newcomer to the homeland security world first beginning to appear in the literature around 2000. Every agency, entity, and author seems to come up with a slightly different definition of Agroterrorism. this series will use an amalgamation of several different pieces from multiple definitions of Agroterrorism to produce yet another definition: A hostile act committed against livestock, poultry, crops, or the food supply, and/or by the introduction of any animal or plant biological agent by any inimical interest against an individual, interest or group for political, economic, or social gain. Agroterrorism is generally a type of Bioterrorism as biological agents are the weapons used in most scenarios.
Agroterrorism and Bioterrorism have been tactics employed throughout history for millennia. Over two thousand years ago the Romans contaminated their enemies water by dumping rotting corpses into their wells. During the French and Indian Wars the English gave smallpox
infested blankets to Indians allied to the French resulting in a devastating epidemic among the native population. Germany engaged in a large-scale bioweapons program during World War I involving the infection of military horses and livestock including swabbing horses and mules with anthrax and glanders as they were shipped to the Allies. World War II saw further use of bioweapons against agriculture targets with Japan’s use of rinderpest and anthrax against Russia and Mongolia as well as Germany’s alleged air dropping beetles into English potato crops. The Soviets later experimented with ticks as a vector for transmitting foot-in-mouth (FMD) disease. Bioweapons research continued well into the
cold war with nine countries having agricultural bioweapons programs including Canada, France, Germany, Iraq, Japan, South Africa, UK, US, and USSR. The unfolding events around the world right now with the spreading Ebola outbreaks have brought the chill of natural outbreaks as well as Bioterrorism back to the forefront of homeland security. The Defense Department is worried the Ebola outbreaks may prompt terror groups to attempt to weaponize Ebola and use it as a weapon of attack.
The Monterey Institute of International Studies James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies has catalogued 23 occurences of chemical or biological weapon incidents targeting agriculture between 1915 and 2008. Also documented are 12 large-scale cases of targeting the food supply including crops, large-scale being defined as more than 30 casualties and/or greater than $100 million in lost revenue. The only Agroterrorism attack known and proven to have occurred in the United States was the Rajneeshee cult infecting restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984. There are currently no known (or at least publicized) threats against the food and agriculture sector, however in the early 2000's in Operation
Enduring Freedom soldiers in Afghanistan searching Al-Qaeda tunnels found documents showing an interest in planning an attack on the West’s food supply systems noting the ease of such an attack and the great economic damage that would result.
The lack of previous Agroterrorism attacks in the U.S. could make gauging the consequences a difficult task. However, in the food and agriculture sector a naturally occurring event looks just like an intentional event. Homeland Security Director of Food, Agriculture, and Water Security Floyd Horn noted, “Naturally occurring outbreaks of diseases signal the devastation that could result from a carefully choreographed intentional release….recent epidemics aptly demonstrate the vulnerability of living targets to biological pathogens and the economic chaos that can result from an outbreak — intentional or otherwise.”
For instance consider the case of an animal disease outbreak. In a FMD outbreak a pig, or a sheep, or a cow will catch the disease, it will become sick, it will begin transmitting the disease, and then the disease spreads to other animals. If the disease is quickly caught and eradicated an outbreak can be averted. If not and the disease wildly spreads out of control then there can be a large-scale disaster. There is only one point of difference in this scenario between a naturally occurring event and an Agroterrorism event and that is at the first point when the first animal becomes infected. Everything else occurs in the same manner, pace, and scale including the spread of the outbreak, identification of the disease, and the response and eradication efforts.
So, the question remains, just what are the potential consequences? In Agroterrorism when one wants to calculate the costs one looks to similar, yet naturally occurring disasters. Take the example just used of an FMD outbreak. A review of the literature finds the experts are in near total agreement that FMD would be the most likely bioagent used in an Agroterrorism attack scenario. There are numerous real world examples of FMD outbreaks. One that is very applicable to the U.S. is the 2001 FMD outbreak in the United Kingdom wherein 3.9 million animals had to be destroyed before the outbreak was eradicated resulting in $6.5 billion in economic damage to the national economy.
Scenarios have been analyzed in the U.S. to project probable damages from a similar event here. A few years ago Florida completed a cost study of the economic damage resulting from a large-scale animal disease event either naturally occurring or Agroterror initiated. Estimated costs and losses were found to be as follows: $1.8 billion for the slaughter of animals, $1 billion in farm disinfection costs, $658 million in animal disposal costs, $78 million for business recovery, $21 million in marketing support, $4 billion in lost agriculture industry revenue, and a 20% hit to Florida’s tourism industry. At $107 billion in direct tourism revenues that is a $21.4 billion loss. Totaling these figures brings a grant total of about $29 billion.
The next chapter of this series, Part III The Food Production System, will go more in depth into the threat to America’s farmlands and croplands. Part III will also further examine the potential consequences including case studies from naturally occurring agriculture disasters.
Link to Part I of this series:
