Agro-Terrorism: From the Farm to the Fork
Published February 19th, 2013
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GAINESVILLE - Agro-terrorism is a purposeful attack which may have a political agenda behind it. But is florida at risk? Well experts tell me because Florida is a peninsula. It can attract unwanted visitors with harmful intentions.
"It's something you enjoy doing," Roger west has been in the cattle business for almost 70 years, practically his entire life. "I really enjoy taking these dogs and going out in the pasture, checking cows and making sure everything is going okay," he says.
Farming is a big deal as Florida's economy heavily depends on agriculture. The net farm income for this year is expected to be about 130 billion dollars. The highest since 1973, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. But we're not the only ones that know this, putting Florida on terrorists' radars.
Frankie Hall with the Florida Farm Bureau says, "Let's face it, a terrorist wins when they see us being economically affected."
Two different incidents in the past decade involving Aalmonella in peanut butter and E Coli in spinach killed 12 people, according to the United State's Food and Drug Administration. All of these were accidental outbreaks but the results bring us to a frightening reality.
West says, "My philosophy is that there's a lot of crazy people in the world and there's no telling what they're able to do."
It all begins on a farm and later hits our supermarket shelves. From the farm to our fork, if america's food chain becomes infected, it's hard to deal with the effects as they are timely and costly. Keith Schneider researcher on food safety at the University of Florida says, sometimes people don't even have to be harmed. "There's been a couple of instances where people have contaminated food and it's made people sick and that causes fear, which again sort of has the same impact where people stop buying a product," Schneider says.
Meaning industries could shut down and people could lose their jobs. He says, just the perception of contaminated food can destroy our state's agricultural economics. Something Hall says can happen to us. "Florida is truly a global state. People are coming to this state globally and so we have to have defensive put in to protect not just Florida but the country," Hall says.
But if an agro-terrorist act happens, there is a solution. Schneider says, "Being able to react quickly, get whatever product is affected off the shelf, notify the public and just having a plan in place, ahead of time."
Systems like Florida's SART State Agricultural Response Team and HACCP Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Points, are measures put in place to protect the industry and the public.
Hall says, "We have some 15 or some major ports of entry, you know like sea ports or airports… The USDA through the FDA we have inspectors on the ground to inspect all incoming products into these airports or sea ports to protect our food supply."
Besides all the state systems put in place to prevent agro-terrorism, what else can be done? Well, farmers can be on the look out for strangers that may enter their farming community and become a possible threat. One way to do that is to make sure your gates are locked at all times.
However, Doug Archer with the 'institute of food and agricultural sciences' at uf says agro-terrorism is something the public shouldn't really worry about. "It would be very difficult to introduce enough of a harmful substance into the food supply to harm a great number of people," Archer says.
West says no matter the circumstances, he will not let his guard down. "You just gotta keep an eye out," West adds.
So far the united states has not been a victim of an agro-terrorism act. Experts hope it remains this way as long as people are vigilant of suspicious activity and report any of it to authorities.
