Chain of Foods

Burgers, not bombs, may be the delivery method for the next terrorist attack on the United States.

By Paul Roberts

August 01, 2004 — CSO — Burgers, not bombs, may be the delivery method for the next terrorist attack on the United States. The U.S.'s industrial-scale farms, feed lots, food processing plants and distribution facilities are rich targets for terrorists who could use deadly pathogens or toxins to corrupt food supplies.

Responding to increased fears about what some refer to as "agroterrorism," President Bush issued a presidential directive, HSPD-9, in January, creating a national policy to defend the agriculture and food systems from terrorist attacks and other disasters. HSPD-9 made it the official policy of the United States to improve the screening of agricultural products, develop early warning and awareness of threats to agriculture, and boost the government's and industry's abilities to respond to threats.

DHS announced $33 million in grants to create two Homeland Security Centers of Excellence in agricultural security.

DHS will give Texas A&M University and its partners $18 million over three years to study the consequences of foreign animal and zoonotic diseases. A second group of schools and food companies headed by the University of Minnesota have formed the National Center for Food Protection and Defense and will use the remaining $15 million to study agricultural security issues in food processing.

Researchers at Texas A&M will use the money for a range of new programs. According to Dr. Neville Clarke, director of the Institute for Countermeasures Against Agriculture Bioterrorism at the university, these will include the development of rapid detection tools and vaccines for animal diseases, and modeling tools that test the efficacy of different types of outbreak interventions.

Unlike their colleagues studying animal diseases, the schools in the National Center for Food Protection and Defenseincluding Harvard, Cornell and Michigan State Universitywill study the security risk of intentional contamination across the entire food supply chain, says Frank Busta, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and director of the university's Department of Food Science and Nutrition.

To do that, the center will amass researchers from various disciplinesincluding public health, food processing, microbiology, food science, business and economics.

Together with other researchers in the field, Busta is confident that DHS's investments in agroterrorism research will close up the security holes before they are discovered by terrorists.

"With adequate funding and support from agencies, we can keep the [food] industry focused on having strong security and minimizing existing vulnerabilities," he says.

Read more about supply chain security in CSOonline's Supply Chain Security section.

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