"For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do."
— Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2004)
From California to New England, there is one thing all farmers have in common: The food they produce is extremely vulnerable to a devastating act of agroterrorism.
The federal government is becoming increasingly anxious about potential attacks on our food supply, principally because introducing agents that would cause mass sickness or economic calamity isn't that hard to do, and there are precious few defenses in place to prevent such a misdeed.
Crisis management and recovery planning get most of the attention but prevention is a moving target because of limited technology, funding and awareness.
Agroterrorism is defined as an intentional criminal act perpetrated on some segment of the agriculture industry and/or the food system, intended to inflict harm, either through a health crisis or economic disruption.
There are hundreds of ways pathogens, poisons, chemicals, toxins or radiological agents could be introduced into the supply chain at any time. It could come as a small amount of botulism introduced into a tanker carrying milk ultimately destined for elementary schools. Or other deadly germs or lethal toxins could be mixed with fertilizer and then sprayed onto crops. Well heads could be tampered with. One of the most effective – and devastating – attacks would be to target processed produce immediately after it is washed and before it is bagged and loaded onto trucks for mass distribution.
The coastal Salinas Valley of Monterey County is home to the largest production of lettuce and leafy greens in the United States and half the state's strawberry crop. Billions of dollars' worth of salad greens, strawberries and commodity crops are grown and processed every year in this valley. Cool nights and warm days make Salinas one of the most ideal climates in the world for growing specialty crops.
The Salinas Valley is a microcosm that can serve to illustrate how, in one incident, a terrorist could sicken or kill thousands, cause billions of dollars in damage to the food industry, instill fear in the populace and destroy faith in the government's ability to protect its citizens.
Who are the terrorists?
Unfortunately, many people think of Middle-East terror groups as the masterminds behind such unthinkable acts. But that is only one of many threats, said David Goldenberg, program manager and coordinator for field training at the Western Center for Food Safety and Security at the University of California, Davis. Sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, Goldenberg is teaching a special series of classes at Hartnell College in Salinas designed for first responders, government officials and operations staff working at the scores of produce processing plants dotting the southern Salinas.
Though the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 were plotted and carried out by extremists from the Middle East, consider other historical attacks on U.S. soil. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, injured more than 680 others and caused $652 million in damage. Then there were the shootings at Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Fort Hood – the list is long and heartbreaking. All were carried out by American citizens.
There is a finite amount of carnage that can be inflicted by conventional weapons, but weaponized bio-agents or toxins, particularly if introduced simultaneously at myriad locations nationwide, are open-ended in the catastrophe they would cause.
Because threats can come from such a diverse cast of characters bent on disrupting the food supply or instilling fear, Goldenberg has received input from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His courses are funded through the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium.
"We have agroterrorism prevention efforts in place with our WMD (weapons of mass destruction) directorate," said Chris Allen, a spokesperson in FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. "The focus of these efforts is on outreach, building relationships and prevention."
The directorate has many parts, including an annual agroterrorism symposium that dates began in 2006. The week-long summit gathers law enforcement with agriculture officials who are on the front lines of preventing, detecting and investigating intentional attacks on the U.S. food supply.
Under the directorate, the FBI focuses on the criminal investigation while the FDA and USDA center their attention on public health.
Why Salinas could be targeted
In the Salinas Valley, $4 billion annually of lettuce, strawberries and commodity vegetables such as broccoli, spinach and cauliflower are harvested, trucked to coolers, and then trucked again to local processing plants. From there they are washed, bagged and loaded onto more trucks destined for Canada, Mexico and throughout the United States, or to commercial ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland where they are loaded onto container ships bound for Asia.
The entire process can be measured in hours, which means that if any toxin or pathogen were introduced at any point along the process, it could be on a plate at a diner in Des Moines or restaurant in Hong Kong long before anyone suspected a problem.
All it would take is the combination of intent and capability – all points along the supply chain would be vulnerable to attack. Farmers live year to year on the viability of their crops. If a crop were rendered unusable, and consumers turned away from the affected product, growers easily could be ruined.
And not just growers. It is estimated that the agriculture industry in the Salinas Valley supports an additional $4 billion in ancillary services, everything from banks and tractor sales to trucking companies and fertilizer sales. That would mean an $8 billion hit to a county with fewer than 500,000 people.
Dennis Donohue, a former mayor of Salinas and a lettuce grower, acknowledges that because their livelihoods are planted outdoors, and having only limited activity at night, there is vulnerability.
"There's an old saying that it's not hard to meet a grower in the daytime in the Salinas Valley, just go stand in his crop uninvited," Donohue said. "Unfortunately, farmers have to sleep."
Today when a human pathogen like E. coli, listeria or salmonella contaminate a food product, often the first sign of a problem is sickness after someone, somewhere consumes the product. Both U.S. and Canadian health officials test produce and meat, but their primary task is to manage outbreaks, not prevent them. Prevention begins on the farm.
The major concern of growers here is water, as a parched California lumbers through its third consecutive dry season and is trying to come to terms with a nearly unprecedented drought. More than 98 percent of California land is now considered to be in an "exceptional drought," the highest level recorded by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Still, as demonstrated by the turnout at Goldenberg's agroterrorism series, farmers are increasingly aware of the dangers from terrorism.
"While it's not a high priority – water has eclipsed everything else – there is concern about contamination of well heads," said Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. "There are so many possible points where someone could insert something into the food chain. It's not a very difficult thing to do."
Economic carnage
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, commerce was deeply affected. It took years for airlines to recover. Huge losses in the stock markets were sustained. Consumer confidence was shaken. History has already foreshadowed what could happen if an attack of that magnitude were leveled on agriculture.
In 2006, an outbreak of Escherichia coli, commonly called E. coli, sickened 199 people and killed three. Months later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration traced the pathogen to an Angus cattle ranch in neighboring San Benito County that had leased land to an organic spinach grower. The FDA called for bagged fresh spinach to be removed from shelves and warned people not to eat any kind of fresh spinach.
California is where three-quarters of all domestically harvested spinach is grown. Farmers suffered an estimated loss of $74 million, much of that in the Salinas Valley, which now grows more than $122.6 million worth of spinach annually. But it took years of aggressive marketing and the implementation of new safety systems to restore consumer confidence.
Susan Pheasant, director of the Agricultural Business & Technology Institute at Hartnell College, said the courses have dual impacts – preparing individuals for both intentional and unintentional outbreaks.
"The Salinas Valley has always been proactive when it comes to food safety," she said. "Whether the act is intentional or unintentional, the idea of the courses are to encourage the ag community to work not only with local first responders, but with state and federal crisis teams as well."
Even pathogens that don't affect human health can wreak economic catastrophes. In 2001, England experienced its most devastating agricultural pathogen outbreak in its history, and not a single human got sick. Foot-and-mouth disease broke out on farms in Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wigh, resulting in the worst animal slaughter in Great Britain's history – some 3.7 million cows, pigs, sheep and lambs had to be shot and cremated.
Five months after the crisis, stockyards were still empty. British consumers lost faith in the industry and in their government. In the end, it cost England's agricultural industry $16 billion – four years worth of Salinas Valley's gross crop revenue. Dairymen lost their farms and many took their own lives.
"It was no different than the stock brokers who jumped off buildings in New York in the crash of 1929," Goldenberg said.
Similar outbreaks of FMD have occurred in Korea, Japan and Taiwan, with horrendous economic effects that lasted years.
Attacks on food nothing new
Recorded modern-era attacks on food supplies date back to World War I when German troops introduced a glanders virus – an infectious disease that occurs primarily in horses, mules, and donkeys – into the ranks of allied troops. Before mechanized troop and supply transports, the military relied on mules and horses to carry supplies. The attack debilitated or killed the mules and effectively brought allied advances to a halt.
In 1984, the word "agroterror" was not a part of anyone's vernacular. But the Rajneeshee cult living in The Dalles, Ore., carried out a near flawless attack on the town's food supply. A group of followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections.
They began spraying salad bars in 10 local restaurants with salmonella, causing the poisoning of 751 people. The incident was the first and single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history, according to Scripps-Howard News Service. It wasn't until years later that a confession uncovered the plot. Up until then, the cause was listed as unknown.
Disturbing was the ease in which the cult manufactured the salmonella, Goldenberg said. Anyone with a degree in microbiology and amateur beer brewing equipment can manufacture a host of human pathogens in their bathtubs.
Yet these examples are amateurish compared to what British and American troops have unearthed in Afghanistan.
What's on the horizon?
As U.S. and British troops were routing al-Qaeda extremists from the caves and villages of Afghanistan, they came across terrorist planning documents left behind, including U.S. agricultural documents, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
In another case, British intelligence raided a terrorist safe house in London and discovered an entire al-Qaeda training manual, complete with bioterrorism instruction and references to food supplies. The training manual was subsequently leaked and posted to a website in the U.S. (The Californian is not disclosing the website, but an abridged version can be found on the U.S. Department of Justice's website).
"There's enough out there on the Internet to cause all kinds of harm." Goldenberg said.
Federal agencies are taking a two-prong approach. They are focusing on training individuals on the local level who will be the first to be called on to manage ment the crisis. Food processing operations staff, fire and police departments, county agriculture officials and public health workers.
The second prong involves a systematic research effort with labs all across the country. Some are academic and others are government supported, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service laboratory in Ames, Iowa.
Project BioShield was launched a few years after the 9/11 attacks when the federal government determined that it would need what it calls "new medical countermeasures," such as diagnostic tests, drugs and vaccines to respond to an attack using chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear agents, or "CBRN." And there are precious little of these countermeasures available in the open market.
"Since diseases and conditions caused by CBRN agents occur infrequently, the private sector did not have an economic incentive to invest the millions of dollars necessary to research and develop such measures," according to the Association Of State And Territorial Health Officials.
Much of the onus to manage an attack is going to fall on the food producers themselves, at least initially. In language recently added to the Food Safety Modernization Act, which is still in draft form but nearing completion, officials added the word "security" to the mandate that food producers have food safety plans. They are now food safety and security plans.
Goldenberg acknowledged that it will be tough hoeing, noting that "unless someone takes a leadership role, many in the industry will just say, 'Oh, it's too hard.' "
Then the question becomes: Who is going to pay for the stepped up security? If the industry has to shoulder the costs, then it's just going to roll right down to consumers. Goldenberg said he would like to see an organized volunteer system similar to Neighborhood Watch designed for rural farming areas. Kennedy, the lettuce grower and former Salinas mayor, is optimistic about uniting as an industry to help thwart possible attacks.
"Our industry has a pretty good history of organizing around critical issues," he said.
It will need to. Certainly the bad guys are organizing.
Senior Writer Dennis L. Taylor covers agriculture for The Californian.com. Follow him on Twitter @taylor_salnews.
Know thine enemy
A few examples of biological agents that could be deployed in the food-supply chain.
Anthrax:Bacillus anthracis is a soil-based bacterium. When nonfungal spores enter the human body, the bacteria become activated. Respiratory infection in humans initially presents with cold or flu-like symptoms for several days, followed by pneumonia and severe respiratory collapse and death.
Botulism: Clostridium botulinum is a food-borne bacteria that produces a toxin that causes muscle paralysis, including respiratory muscles that can cause a person to stop breathing.
Pneumonic plague: Yersinia pestis is a bacteria that can be weaponized in aerosol form. Without early treatment, pneumonic plague often leads to respiratory failure, shock and rapid death.
Smallpox: There are two types of the highly contagious disease, each with different fatality rates. Variola major, the most common form, can kill three in 10 of its victims. In its naturally occurring state, smallpox has been eradicated, but there are concerns that stockpiles may still exist.
Tularemia: A bacteria that is highly infectious, requiring only 10-50 organisms to cause disease. Weaponized tularemia would be made airborne. It can cause lethal pneumonia.
Hemorrhagic fevers: A class of naturally occurring viruses that attack multiple human organ systems. Ebola is one such virus – a current outbreak in West Africa has killed at least 2,400 in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control
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