By Scott Stewart
There has been some media speculation recently about the possibility of terrorist groups targeting the food supply. This is a topic that has come up repeatedly in the years since 9/11. From time to time, the possibility of such an attack creates a bit of concern among the public and especially among organizations focused on food issues, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or agricultural trade groups.
However, despite the potentially grave consequences of an attack against the food supply -- and concerns raised by these consequences -- such attacks are in fact quite rare. There are good reasons for this lack of attacks against the food supply.
Types of Attacks Targeting Food Supplies
At the most basic level, threats to a country's food supply can come in two general forms: attacks designed to create famine and attacks designed to directly poison people.
Attacks designed to create famine are the types of attacks most frequently discussed in the press. This sort of attack would presumably entail the use of some agent intended to kill vast quantities of crops or livestock. Such agents could include pathogens, insects or chemicals. The pathogens might include such livestock diseases as bird flu or hoof-and-mouth disease. Crop diseases could include the Ug99 fungus or various molds and cankers.
Attacks designed to poison people could also be divided into two general categories: those intended to introduce toxins or pathogens into foodstuffs prior to processing and those intended to attack finished food products. Attacks against foodstuffs during agricultural production could include placing a chemical or biological agent or toxin on crops in the field, while crops are in transit or when the food is at a mill or processing center. Attacks against finished foodstuffs would entail covertly placing the toxin or pathogen into a food product after processing.
Past Attacks Prove Few and Far Between
As noted above, actual attacks against food supplies are very rare. And due to the constraints we will detail later, almost all of these attacks have involved a toxin introduced into processed foods or raw foods packaged for human consumption rather than an attack attempting to cause famine.
While people frequently become sick from pathogens in food such as E. coli or salmonella bacteria, most of these incidents are not intentional. One of the few known successful attempts at using a biological agent to contaminate food in the United States occurred in 1984 in the small Oregon town of The Dalles. Followers of cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, attempting to manipulate a local election, infected salad bars in 10 restaurants with Salmonella typhimurium, causing about 751 people to become ill.
A second contamination attempt occurred in October 1996, when 13 laboratory workers at a large medical center in Texas experienced severe gastrointestinal illness after eating muffins and doughnuts left in their break room. Laboratory tests revealed that the pastries had been infected with Shigella dysenteriae, a pathogen that rarely occurs in the United States. An investigation later determined that the pathogen came from a stock culture kept at the lab and was intentionally placed on the infected food items. A worker at the lab was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the attack on her coworkers.
Many people recall the 1989 Chilean grape scare, when two grapes imported to the United States were found to have been injected with cyanide. However, few recall that the perpetrator in the case made several calls to the U.S. Embassy warning of the contamination and was therefore not seriously attempting to harm people, but rather attempting to draw attention to social injustice in Chile. The warning calls allowed agricultural inspectors to find the damaged and discolored grapes before they were eaten. It is also likely that the damaged grapes would have been discarded rather than eaten.
In a lesser-known case that took place in 1978, a dozen children in the Netherlands and West Germany were hospitalized after eating oranges imported from Israel. The Abu Nidal Organization, using the nom de guerre the Arab Revolutionary Council, deliberately contaminated the fruit by injecting it with mercury in an attempt to damage the Israeli economy.
Constraints on Food Supply Attacks
While attacks against the food supply may appear simple in theory, they have occurred infrequently for good reason. Considering the sheer size of the global agricultural sector, or even the national agricultural sector in a large country such as the United States, conducting an assault against such a huge target that would result in famine would be extremely difficult.
As seen in the coca, opium poppy and marijuana eradication efforts by the United States and its partners in Mexico, Central America and the Andes, the logistical effort required to make any substantial dent in agricultural production is massive. Even the vast resources the United States has dedicated to drug eradication tasks in small countries for decades -- including manual eradication and overt plane flights spraying untold thousands of gallons of herbicides -- have failed to create more than a limited impact on marijuana, poppy and coca crops. Obviously, any sort of meaningful chemical attack on U.S. agriculture would have to be so massive that it is simply not logistically feasible.
This is where pathogens -- agents that can, at least in theory, be introduced in limited amounts, reproduce and then rapidly spread to infect a far larger area -- enter the picture. In order to be effective at killing crops or animals, however, a pathogen must be one that is easily spread, is very deadly and has a long incubation period (in order to ensure it is passed along before the host dies). It is also very helpful to the propagation of a disease if it is difficult to detect and/or difficult to treat. While a pathogen that possesses all of the aforementioned traits could be devastating, finding such an agent is difficult. Few diseases have all the requisite characteristics. Some are very deadly, but act too quickly to spread before killing the host. Others are more readily passed but do not have a long incubation period or are not as virulent. Still other pathogens, such as the Ug99 wheat fungus, are fairly easy to detect and kill in the developed world -- although naturally occurring Ug99 is still a significant threat to crops in parts of Africa.
It is also important to note that genetically engineering a super bug -- one that possess all the characteristics to make it highly effective -- and then actually creating or synthesizing the organism is still much harder in real life than it is in Hollywood.
Even if such an effective super pathogen is found or somehow created, someone intending to use it in an attack must isolate the virulent strain of the pathogen, manufacture it in sufficient quantities to be effective, ship it to the place of the planned attack and then distribute it so that it is effectively dispersed in sufficient quantity to create an epidemic. The infrastructure required to undertake such an endeavor is both large and expensive. Even in past cases where groups possessed the vast monetary resources to fund biological weapons efforts and amassed the scientific expertise to attempt such a program -- Aum Shinrikyo comes to mind -- it has proven very difficult to produce and effectively disperse virulent pathogens in large quantities.
Another factor making these sorts of attacks difficult to orchestrate is the very nature of farming. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers have battled plant and animal diseases. Most of the pathogens that are mentioned in connection with attacks against agriculture include naturally occurring pathogens such as hoof-and-mouth disease, various strains of bird flu and the Ug99 fungus. As a result, farmers and governmental organizations such as the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service already have systems in place to monitor crops and animals for signs of these pathogens. When these pathogens appear, action is taken and diseased crops are treated or eradicated. Animals are treated or culled. Even in past cases where major disease outbreaks required massive eradication and culling efforts -- bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the United Kingdom, citrus canker in Florida or the many bird flu outbreaks over the past few years -- the diseases have not crippled the country's agricultural sector, much less resulted in famine.
As far as attacks intended to poison agricultural products, introducing some sort of toxin before the raw food is processed is difficult, given the sheer volume of agricultural products produced. In fact, much of the grain grown is diverted to uses other than human consumption; for instance, corn is used to produce ethanol and livestock feed. Therefore, even if a truckload of corn were poisoned, it might never funnel into the human food chain.
Moreover, even if a truck of contaminated grain were destined for the food chain, by the time it made its way through the process it would most likely be too diluted to have any effect. During the production process, contaminated corn would first have to combine with other grain, sit in a silo, be moved and stored again, ground and finally made into a finished food product such as a package of tortilla chips. Processing, washing, cooking, pasteurizing and refining could also further dilute, cleanse away or otherwise mitigate the toxin applied to the targeted product. At this point, food is also inspected for naturally occurring pathogens and toxins. Such inspections could help spot an intentional contamination. Still, if a damaged food gets all the way to the consumer, humans pay attention to what they eat, and they tend to recognize and reject bad food on sight or smell.
Besides, even contaminating one truckload of grain would require a large amount of toxin. Producing that much toxin would require a substantial infrastructure -- one that would require a great deal of time and money to build -- not to mention the difficulty inherent in transporting and delivering the toxin. Quite simply, there are far easier and more cost-effective ways to kill people and create panic.
Potential Players and the Possible Impact
An attack against the food supply could be conducted by a wide array of actors, ranging from a single mentally disturbed individual on one end of the spectrum to sovereign nations on the other. Cults and domestic or transnational terrorist groups fall somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The motivations of these diverse actors could range from monetary extortion or attempts to commit mass murder to acts of war designed to cripple a nation's economy or its ability to project power.
Of this array of potential actors, however, there are very few non-state actors who possess the ability to conduct attacks that could have a substantial impact on a nation's food supply. In fact, most of the potential actors are only capable of contaminating finished food products. While they all have this rudimentary capability, there remains the question of intent.
Documents and manuals found in Afghanistan after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion revealed an al Qaeda interest in conducting chemical and biological attacks, although this interest was not a well-developed program. From a cost-benefit standpoint, it is far cheaper and easier to use explosives or firearms to conduct an attack than it would be to execute a complicated plot against the food supply. Besides, such an attack would not produce the type of spectacular imagery the group enjoys -- indeed, we have not seen a jihadist attack against the food supply.
While the food supply has not been a part of al Qaeda's preferred target set, it is possible that a mentally disturbed individual, a grassroots jihadist or some other, smaller extremist organization could attempt to conduct an attack by poisoning food. While any such offensive would likely have limited success in creating mass casualties, it could have wider societal repercussions by causing panic if a group takes credit for food-related deaths.
The public has become somewhat accustomed to food scares and recalls over things such as contaminated spinach, ground beef, cantaloupes and green onions. Even warnings about lead and other harmful chemicals in food imported from China have caused concern in recent years. However, if a terrorist group conducted even a relatively unsuccessful attack on the food supply, it could create significant hysteria -- especially if the media sensationalizes such an event. In such a case, even a terrorist plot that was largely ineffective could result in a disproportionate amount of panic, much like that seen following the 2001 anthrax attacks.
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