AGRICULTURE AND FOOD/WATER SUPPLY PROTECTION

These class notes were composed by Dr. Tom O'Connor for his class on Homeland Security at NORTH CAROLINA WESLEYAN COLLEGE, original documents can be found here

AGRICULTURE AND FOOD/WATER SUPPLY PROTECTION
"Food is our common ground, a universal experience" (James Beard)

Since key vulnerabilities exist, from the terrorist's point of view, agriculture makes the perfect target for perfect weapons (Alibeck & Handelmann 1999), and may be very appealing to some deranged criminal genius, agroterrorist, or enemy of the United States. The U.S. is the world's leader in food production, and any attack on crops or animals has the potential for wiping out at least 15% of the nation's economy, 16% of the nation's workforce, and significantly impacting America's position and image in the world today. Biological terrorism aimed against a nation's food supply is called agroterrorism, sometimes defined as "the deliberate introduction of a plant or animal disease with the goal of generating fear, causing economic losses and undermining stability. What this basically means is causing a loss of animal life or crops to a terror element in order to disrupt the food supply" (Aboutcom: Agroterrorism). The purpose of it isn't really to kill all the animals and/or people, but mainly to cripple a society or economy and/or more often to demoralize a nation through publicity, hoax, and hype (Cole 1999). The economic effect is perhaps the most serious threat since the economic losses would include: costs of destroying contaminated crops/livestock; compensation to farmers; costs of preventing spread; U.S. export sanctions; and inflation due to rising cost of other products. FBI data indicates that over 80% of incidents are hoaxes, but there are numerous inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the literature on agroterrorism (see Ron Purver's Article on the Actual Threats from Bioterrorism or RAND's Research Brief).

Agroterrorism can kill vast numbers of people, including the instigators of it. Like bioterrorism, it can be motivated by religion, politics, ideology, or criminal inclinations, and it can be committed by individual "lone wolves", sect or cult groups, or state-sponsored insurgencies and paramilitaries. Ecoterrorists, religious extremists, and anti-abortion activists as well as race-based domestic terrorist groups have been known to engage in bioterrorism. According to data in the Monterey Database, the most frequent motivation is political, either to assassinate a rival or pursue nationalist causes. The simplest way to commit agroterrorism is to instill fear in a population, and to attack at any one of the nation's two million commercial farms, any one of the many more storage and handling facilities, any restaurant or grocery store, or just send a contaminated gift pack of food through the mail, and let panic-driven quarantine and recall do the rest. The most advanced way to commit agroterrorism is to "weaponize" an agent like anthrax, tularemia, plague, smallpox, botulism, or viral hemorrhagic fever and deliver it airborne dispersed in aerosol form, or any other delivery method that results in long-term soil contamination. Some advanced skills are needed for aerosol dispersal methods, but simply using infected, human "guinea pigs" to travel throughout a population with some designer-altered "advanced" disease would probably constitute the worst-case scenario. The need is imperative for a preparedness and response plan (at least to avoid panic), and this is in addition to the need for detecting and responding to an actual agroterrorist attack, which may be delayed because it usually takes days or weeks before an attack is fully known. There is also the need for realistic threat and risk assessments. Obviously, this is a homeland security priority area, and just because the U.S. is becoming less-and-less an agricultural nation, that is no reason not to protect the food supply. An agroterrorist event could disrupt not only U.S. food, but that of the countries that depend on the U.S. to provide them with food.

Threats and attacks on a nation's food supply are an unconventional and rare form of terrorism. In terms of risk, bioterrorism is a low probability - high consequence event. There are historical cases of it being used in warfare. For example, the British and French used smallpox-infected blankets against Native Americans during the 1760s, Germany used plague and cholera against livestock during WWI, the Japanese used a variety of agents against prisoners of war during WWII, and both the United States and Russia built up their biowarfare capability during the Cold War. Currently, at least a dozen counties, many of them "rogue" states, possess an arsenal of dangerous biological weapons (Davis 1999). Some of more well-known bioterrorism events include an incident in Dalles, Oregon during 1984 when followers of a Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh sect sprayed the salad bars at two restaurants with Salmonella in hopes of throwing off a local election so that a planned land use vote would be favorable to the building of their world headquarters. In Tokyo during 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released deadly sarin gas in the subway system, and the group was later discovered to be developing botulism, anthrax, cholera, and Q fever weapons. In the United States in the late 1990s, a series of anthrax threats were made using the nation's postal system.

Most often, the targets of attack are political officials or federal employees of agencies like the IRS and Marshals who are investigating a group or individual. The pattern of use appears to be one of "defensive aggression" more than some stark-raving lunatic driven toward global annihilation. Many more bioterrorists fail every year than those who succeed, and the (recoverable) illness rates far exceed death rates after an actual attack. Many bioterrorists have their "beef" against someone or someplace specific, often the population of a certain city. For example, the Tylenol Terrorist who hit Chicago during 1982 by cyanide tampering with over-the-counter medicine bottles in six drug stores had a "beef" against all of society, but seemed to have a systematic pattern of attack (see excerpt & map).

*The Tylenol Terrorism Incident of 1982*
Seven people died from cyanide-laced Tylenol and numerous "copycat" incidents followed. An unknown quantity of packages (the FDA said 36) contained 65 milligrams of cyanide laced on the pills, far more than needed to kill. The case remains officially unsolved and was only detected by off-duty firemen who pieced together bits of information from news reports. Like the 270 Halloween poisonings that year, the attacks were meant to look like the work of a random madman. Hospitals were swamped with people from the panic. Some people tried to extort money from Johnson & Johnson, who did a $100 million recall. The U.S. lost its innocence that year, as tamper-proof packaging soon became the norm on drugstore shelf products.

Besides incidents of bioterrorism, there are many isolated incidents of sabotage (intentional) and accidental (unintentional) contamination of food due to processing or handling errors. The agencies in charge of public safety in this regard face a wide spectrum of threats and have enormous responsibilities. Let's examine some key agencies.

For many years, the United States has had pretty good safeguards in place against accidental contamination, and these safeguards have been enforced primarily by two high-level agencies:

Of these two, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture is the larger agency (the fifth largest cabinet agency) with seven different mission areas and seventeen different sub-agencies. For example, criminal justice students may be familiar with the Forest Service, which is a sub-agency within the Dept. of Agriculture; others may be familiar with the Food Stamp Program, School Lunch Program, or WIC (Women, Infants, & Children), which are run by an Agriculture sub-agency; and farmers are probably familiar with crop insurance programs run by Agriculture. However, if we take away all the environmental, research, marketing, nutritional, and economic development missions, we are left with only one sub-agency responsible for food security, and that is the sub-agency called the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). It carries out its responsibilities for food security and emergency preparedness with the FDA and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The EPA is an independent executive branch agency that works to implement any clean air, water, and land legislation passed by Congress.

The FDA is part of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, or HHS (the eighth largest cabinet agency). Most people are familiar with the role of HHS in Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, social services, and more. However, the Food & Drug Administration is a decentralized sub-agency (of 175 field offices) within HHS which is responsible not only for food, but cosmetics, medical devices, and radiation-emitting consumer products, like microwaves. Additionally, the FDA regulates prescription and over-the-counter drugs, pet medicine, blood banks, immunizations, and safe drinking water. For homeland security purposes, the FDA closely monitors any reporting of illnesses related to food or medicinal products, and issues Advisories, Alerts, Bulletins, Recalls, and other Notices of Adverse Events. However, HHS is fortunate to also have a sub-agency called the Center for Disease Control, or CDC, which is a relatively small agency headquartered out of Atlanta with strong local and state partnerships around the nation. CDC is primarily responsible for "credible" heath information, which means the best and most up-to-date ways to secure health. CDC has traditionally worked on such infectious diseases as tuberculosis, syphilis, HIV/AIDS, West Nile Virus, and SARS, but since 9/11 has moved into the forefront of bioterrorism preparedness.

The USDA has increased the number of inspection staff (veterinarians & food import surveillance officers) at borders and ports of entry, and approximately 2,600 personnel in this inspection force have been transferred to DHS. In addition, approximately 300 private veterinarians are part of USDA's Reserve Corps. The agency has also created a surveillance/coordination center within a unit called APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service). This unit is primarily responsible for addressing some major agricultural threats, including the following:

In addition, it's possible to target specific threats from specific countries with known terrorist activity. For example, Saudi Arabia is ranked 5th in the world in exporting dates to the United States, Syria is 5th in the world in exporting of apricots and 10th in eggplants, Oman is 9th in importing of prunes to the U.S., and Jordan is 10th in almonds and 7th in pistachios. Of course, groups like the Organic Consumers Association believe we have less to worry about with imported food compared to the frequently contaminated, irradiated, and genetically engineered food produced domestically. For example, a rocket fuel contaminant called perchlorate has been found in the domestic lettuce and milk of 15 states. APHIS uses remote sensing/diagnostic equipment to detect foreign pest and animal disease at ports of entry, and in this sense, is responsible for border security as much as CBP and ICE are. Furthermore, it must be remembered that USDA also maintains Forest Service personnel along the northern and southern borders. The Forest Service, in fact, has its own air force with 13 different aviation facilities. The Forest Service not only protects forestland, but dams, reservoirs, pipelines, water treatment plants, power lines, and energy production facilities on government property.

In many ways, USDA is a model agency for how federal-state-local collaboration ought to work. There have always been state and county-level Agriculture offices which are consumer-friendly, and in recent years, USDA has beefed up the training and seminars directed at these local levels with respect to emergency preparedness. USDA has some excellent computer databases (on fertilizer, food, feed, and seed), and these resources are regularly shared with academics as well as ordinary citizens. Not only ordinary citizens, but foreign non-citizens are sometimes sponsored by USDA as visiting scientists. Actually, because of USDA's traditional openness, it has unfortunately been constrained in recent years to upgrade the use of background investigations and start using security clearances. The issue of how many people need security clearances is an issue that permeates all recent homeland security efforts for all agencies.

EPA, the "agency for the environment," has historically protected the wilderness (as a national resource) and is driven, in part, by the concept of ecology -- which values esthetics and biology over efficiency and commerce. EPA is also driven by the idea of environmentalism -- which involves repairing damage done by pollution to the nation's air and water supply. National environmental policy has long required the filing of Environmental Impact Statements with the EPA when some planned project bears on the environment. The EPA has also been at the forefront of "superfund" clean-up efforts, and maintains contingency plans for what to do in the case of oil spills and other emergencies. Superfund refers to an effort, since 1980, to clean up the nation's hazardous waste sites, and there are some 294,000 hazardous waste sites nationwide. As of 2004, the superfund cleanup project is about 60% complete, and there have been many delays, the most significant one being the dust cleanup after the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse.

One of the EPA's main contributions to homeland security is its Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office, or CEPPO, which deals with countering superterrorist threats and the impact of toxic poisonous chemicals, disease organisms, and radioactivity. It is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that CEPPO should be considered a counterterrorism agency, but it operates mainly through partnerships at the local level. CEPPO not only assists and trains local partners, but is willing, to some extent, within legal guidelines, to share what information it knows about incident prevention and response with the public. CEPPO also works closely with the National Response Center (NRC emergency hotline at 1-800-424-8802), which is the sole point of contact for reporting oil and chemical spills, and the National Response Team, a group of 16 federal agencies with interest and expertise in various aspects of response to pollution and HAZMAT incidents. Additionally, CEPPO reaches out internationally, and studies the lessons learned from biological and chemical terrorist incidents overseas.

Water supply protection is also spearheaded by EPA. "Water conflict" (Gleick 1993) or "water terrorism" (Mays 2004) has a long history, as damage to water systems has been a part of warfare, political disputes, terrorism, and even cyber-terrorism. For example, during 1998, a computer hacker broke into the SCADA computer system that runs Arizona's Roosevelt Dam, gaining possible control of the floodgates, threatening the downstream cities of Mesa, Tempe, and Phoenix. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and SCADA systems are Internet-based monitoring and control stations used for all sorts of utility infrastructures, such as the nation's power grids and water treatment facilities (see Sandia's Center for SCADA Security). The Department of Energy's Office of Energy Assurance is primarily responsible for SCADA asset protection, but there are many other kinds of threats to water systems. Below are the general categories of threats:

There are approximately 160,000 Public Water Systems (PWS) in the United States, serving about 84% of the population, the remainder using private wells. Commercial systems and those serving populations larger than 3,300 are required by the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 to submit vulnerability assessments to the EPA, and about 90% of water service providers complied by the end of 2003. However, these vulnerability assessments were little more than audits and much less than risk assessments. For instance, they consisted mostly of physical security checklists such as whether physical barriers are present around pumping stations and whether hazardous chemicals are safely stored on-site. Although physical security is important because water pumps are usually custom-built and take 18 months to replace (Campbell 2004), risk under these vulnerability assessments tends to treat the possibilities for illness as less important than the possibilities of service disruption. Understanding vulnerability is only the first step to improving security, and the EPA plans to develop tools and training to upgrade security and eventually conduct attack scenarios. It should also be noted that even though the Bioterrorism Act doesn't require it (other legislation like the 1972 Clean Water Act does), the EPA continues to be involved in vulnerability assessments for wastewater management through its Office of Wastewater Management. This is significant since sewage sludge (biosolid) is a big problem, and an even bigger problem is the cross-contamination from storm sewers and sanitary sewers (everytime it rains), the latter being the number one cause of pollution or impairment in the nation's water supply.

For the history of bioterrorism, strongly recommended is the CDC's bioterrorism site which contains some short videos about the history of bioterrorism and how the following agents can (and in some cases have) been used as weapons -- anthrax, plague, smallpox, botulism, viral hemorrhagic fever, and tularemia. These are very good videos and make for excellent instructional materials. At this point, for purposes of brevity, the focus will be on the latest developments in bioterror preparedness. In late 2004, a nonprofit organization called the Trust for America's Health issued a report (as they did the year before) on the states' preparedness for bioterrorism, and the following criteria were used to produce the rankings that the map reflects (light blue being the most-prepared states).

The Center for Disease Control has long had a comprehensive emergency plan (see 1998 CDC Strategic Plan) and many states since 9/11 (due to a $2 billion investment by the federal government) have added Bioterrorism Preparedness units or sub-agencies to their Public Health Offices. Perhaps the most important thing that ties them all together are the CDC Notification Procedures for Suspected Bioterrorism Events (which require notifying the FBI first). There are also several national centers for biosecurity (see Internet Resources below), and the National Institute of Health (part of HHS) has had a component since 1948 called the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The consensus of most experts is that NIAID has the most expertise, and it plans in 2005 to establish an integrated research facility on the grounds of Ft. Detrick, Maryland. For a long time, the U.S. Army has operated out of Ft. Detrick at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) there. Ft. Detrick (and perhaps only four other places) have the kinds of facilities to conduct laboratory tests at Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4). Below is a list of these biosafety levels:

There are many issues in bioterrorism preparedness besides the need for more research laboratories. Certain coordination problems exist. For example, federal homeland security money is usually sent to the states to invest at the state level, and this creates a problem when there is a large inner-city hospital system within that state. In such cases, the state might mandate a smallpox inoculation schedule which is at odds with what city officials think is the best locality schedule. Furthermore, less than 50% of all hospitals have the ventilation equipment necessary to even conduct emergency preparedness drills. There is a nationwide shortage of N-95 respirators which are to be used on infectious patients. Most drills and scenarios that have been conducted indicate that the nation's hospital system will be tremendously overwhelmed if there ever is a large-scale infectious disease outbreak. Homeland security efforts have primarily consisted of attempts to get more Public Health workers to volunteer for a Public Health Service Corps, and there is a Surgeon General's Commissioned Corps of 6,000 professionals and an unknown number of others in the Medical Reserve of Citizen Corps. Volunteer action is coordinated under the umbrella organization called Freedom Corps, and all volunteers are asked to serve 4,000 hours of their time, or about two years. FEMA has also relied on volunteers over the years with its Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT). It is unknown if these large-scale volunteer programs will sufficiently address the problem.

A second wave of homeland security efforts has been directed at the problem of hospital surge capacity for mass casualty events. This has involved federal intervention in the way hospitals operate their emergency rooms, if they have one, and DHS would like to see more emergency rooms built. In 2003, the federal government mandated changes in rules governing hospitals’ obligations to patients seeking emergency care but were uninsured. The law is known as the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), and although it is part of Medicare law (since 1986) known to most physicians as COBRA (Consolidated Budget Reconciliation Act), it has taken center stage in bioterrorism law (see MedLaw.com). There are some unusual specifics in EMTALA law, such as the 250-yard rule, which states that hospital employees don't have to come out of the hospital to retrieve a sick person unless the victim is carried or transported to within that distance of the emergency room. Under the new law, hospitals are also not allowed to delay the provision of services in order to screen patients or check into their payment method/insurance status. Under clarifications issued in 2004 by the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, hospitals can only turn away (or transfer) a bioterrorism victim if that hospital participates in an integrated Emergency Response Plan (ERP) with other community and state agencies. This hard-line approach is intended to ensure hospital compliance. In addition, hospitals can be fined $50,000 per EMTALA violation and such violations also expose hospitals to multimillion dollar civil lawsuits. Lawsuits by medicare and medicaid patients who have been turned away by hospitals have been quite common since EMTALA, and average about $20 million apiece. While most physicians and medical professionals would probably like to comply with homeland security efforts, one can understandably see why there is much cause for concern.

PRINTED RESOURCES
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