|
Posted 11/14/01
The country's heightened awareness of terrorism has raised questions in recent months about the vulnerability of the nation's food supply. But Assistant Professor of Geography Susanne Freidberg, who studies the cultural and economic geography of food trade, believes the nation's food supply is not a prime target for terrorists.
"The more centralized the production of food, the more attractive it is to terrorists," said Freidberg. U.S. consumers receive their food from such varied sources that it would be difficult for a terrorist to produce a large-spread outbreak of food-borne illness.
"For example, the risks are less for fresh produce than for manufactured foods, because there are so many places our produce comes from and the circuits of marketing are very decentralized. It might be easy to poison a particular farm, but it would be difficult to create a terrorist impact," she said.
Meat packing, which is dominated by three or four large companies in the United States, would be the most vulnerable industry, Freidberg believes. The livestock industry could also be targeted for forms of "agro-terrorism," which would threaten animals more directly than humans. Foot-and-mouth disease, for example, would be very hard to stop. On the other hand, mad cow disease wouldn't be very effective as a terrorist weapon because it takes so long for it to show up in the food supply.
If anything, Freidberg argues, the livestock industry's own practices have made food-borne pathogens into more potent weapons. Nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed, a practice widely used in the livestock industry to produce more robust animals, has lessened the country's ability to respond to certain types of food-borne illness, such as salmonella. Before antibiotics were routinely fed to livestock, food-borne diseases like salmonella were relatively benign, said Freidberg. However, antibiotic use now has helped create stronger, more resistant types of salmonella.
"If someone were to duplicate the terrorist attack that happened in 1984 in which a terrorist spread salmonella on salad bars in Oregon, it would be even more dangerous now. People would be much sicker," she said.
Even if a terrorist were successful in tampering with the food supply, the high incidence of food-borne illness in the United States -- an estimated 76 million cases per year with 5,000 fatalities -- could make it difficult to distinguish food terrorism from naturally occurring illness, according to Freidberg.
Concentrating on reducing the incidence of food-borne illness would be a wise use of resources that could also protect against food terrorism, she added. Freidberg, who recently has been researching how Europe's food scares, such as mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks, have affected the African countries that export to the European market, is writing a book titled French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age.
|
