Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

(Washington, D.C.): It is a singularly disturbing thought: Could your dinner be your downfall? Daily, headlines from Europe scream about grave new dangers to the food supply. Mad Cow disease fears and the recent outbreak of Hoof and Mouth disease have not only cost countries like the United Kingdom billions of dollars; they have awakened European citizens to the unpleasant fact that nature is not always predictable or forgiving.

But what if an adversary intentionally set out to disrupt or destroy the food supply? The results could go well beyond the economic ruin of agricultural suppliers literally to the very lifeblood of humanity. As Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. points out in a column in the American Spectator Online, were such a threat to be carried out against the United States, for example, the impact would be felt not only by Americans consumers but by millions around the globe who depend on U.S. agriculture for their daily bread.

Biowar on the food supply is truly a global menace and one that has heretofore been all but ignored. If any good were to come from Britain and Europe’s current misfortune, it will be a heightened awareness of the real vulnerability of the world’s food supply — and the adoption of a comprehensive program to mitigate the attendant risks.

Great Britain’s economy is reeling from the cumulative effect of outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as Mad Cow disease, and more recently Hoof and Mouth disease. Billions of dollars worth of U.K. livestock has had to be destroyed; the British agricultural sector has been severely — if not permanently — harmed; and markets for Britain’s meat exports have cratered.

Germany and other European Union nations have lately begun to confront their own outbreaks of BSE, with traumatic effects on public confidence in the food supply and the governments they hold responsible for assuring its safety. The costs of containing the damage and its economic and potential political repercussions could prove to be immense.
Two questions occur: Could an outbreak of such diseases happen in the United States? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. That is especially true since the second question — Could someone deliberately infect American agriculture with BSE, Hoof and Mouth disease or perhaps plant viruses? — also has to be answered in the affirmative.

In fact, there is growing awareness that the U.S. food supply could be the object of biological warfare (BW) attacks aimed at deliberately achieving what has been accomplished by the seemingly natural outbreaks of veterinary diseases in Europe: the widespread disruption of the American food-producing sector, with incalculable consequences for the health and well-being of not only the farming industry but of the population of the United States more generally — and indeed that of hundreds of millions worldwide who subsist thanks to our agricultural exports.

It is no exaggeration to say that under certain plausible scenarios widespread hunger and malnutrition — if not areas of actual starvation — could ensue, with ominous implications for the domestic rule of law and international stability.

Unfortunately, this dangerous possibility is not a secret. A recent Internet search of the topic of biowarfare against the food supply yielded over 3,000 citations. One of the most informative of these was the report of a symposium convened in Montreal in August 1999 by the American Phytopathological Society (APS) entitled “Plant Pathology’s Role in Anti- Crop Bioterrorism and Food Security.” Among its numerous troubling findings were the following:

“If we are to reduce the potential of deliberate introduction of crop pathogens, we must be able to fingerprint pathogens and discriminate between naturally occurring disease events and those which may be deliberately introduced for harmful purposes. The effective tracking of new and emerging diseases in the U.S. and throughout the world is critically needed to help make these determinations….Unfortunately, because the international infrastructure concerning plant pathology is not well developed, the identification of a deliberate release of a pathogen is difficult to ascertain. A major cause of this deficiency is the absence of a rapid reporting system.”

There is another serious deficiency, however. No one knows exactly what sorts of viruses would-be bioterrorists or their state-sponsors might have in mind for waging war against America’s food supply.

A case in point is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. International monitors charged with ferreting out Saddam’s secret biological weapons program never were able to wrest from the Iraqi despot any sample from his BW stockpile. As a result, the full dimensions of this program remain what Richard Butler, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq’s second chairman, has called a “black hole.”

This is all the more worrisome insofar as the Iraqi BW program would be the easiest of Iraq’s proscribed programs to reconstitute. Indeed, it was widely expected that Saddam would be able to do that within six months of the end of the U.N. inspections, something that occurred over two years ago.

Seth Carus of the National Defense University has offered a possible explanation for Saddam’s adamant refusal to reveal anything about his activities: Biological agents, including pathogens useful in attacking the food supply, have DNA. A sample could provide exactly the “fingerprint” needed to ascertain the source of a deliberate outbreak of animal diseases (such as BSE or Hoof and Mouth) or plant pathogens (such as those identified by the APS, including tomato infectious yellows, lettuce chlorosis, and high plains virus of corn). By maintaining the covert status of his entire biological stockpile, Saddam may believe he retains the option of carrying out biological terrorism with impunity. Ditto the Russians, Chinese and others — perhaps to include Osama bin Laden and his ilk — who are capable of waging biological warfare.

The APS report from the August 1999 symposium dryly concludes by “urg[ing] all relevant agencies, to recognize the need to confront this threat and financially support appropriate research for fingerprinting high priority pathogens, detecting deliberate releases, developing rapid genetic-based diagnostic assays, epidemiology and risk prediction, and other scientific and technical approaches to reduce this risk.” The outbreak of agricultural diseases in Europe should powerfully catalyze the new Bush Administration to do all this — and much more — to prepare the U.S. against the possibility that such a fate, or worse, will be deliberately inflicted upon this country.