Meat + Poultry - September 2006 - 55

dinner

Assessing
vulnerabilities

to our food supply?
telecommunications, banking, water. There
has been an increase, but it's going up from
zero."

Starting with agriculture
One of the more invisible aspects of our
agricultural sector is how essential it is to
our national economic well-being. Farming
may employ less than 3 percent of Americans, but one person in six works in an
occupation directly supported by food production. And though agriculture accounts
for 13 percent of our gross domestic product, it is relatively unprotected.
"Our agricultural sector is vulnerable;
all agricultural sectors across the world are
vulnerable," says Brian Houghton, director
of research at the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. "There
is little security."
Historically, biological attacks against
agriculture have been rare. There have
been only 12 documented cases of organizations using pathogenic agents to infect
livestock or contaminate food since 1912.
Only two of those were terrorist events,
and only one was in the U.S.: the 1984
Rajneeshee Salmonella food poisoning in
Oregon (see sidebar on page 6). (The other
was a 1952 incident in Kenya in which a
plant toxin was used to kill livestock.)
Nevertheless, it's undeniable that

there are countless points of vulnerability
between the farm and the plate. Characteristics of our system that make it vulnerable
are many, including a low level of diversity
that makes farms biologically fragile, a high
degree of economic concentration and a
dependence on food coming from far
away. In the U.S., the average food item
travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from
farm to plate. Farms are widely dispersed,
and few are protected from intrusion.
There is rapid movement throughout the
system, increasing the potential for a disease to spread. And the sheer size of feedlots and dairies preclude producers from
attending to animals individually.
"Production is open by nature; it was
never meant to be a secure industry," says
Houghton, who believes the beef industry
to be the most fragile. Vulnerabilities for
the beef industry include a diminishing
pool of veterinarians who can identify and
treat foreign animal diseases and a lack of
trust between regulators and producers,
who are loath to report disease on their
premises because of a lack of indemnity.
The capabilities required to exploit
those vulnerabilities would be rudimentary. Because the animals act as the
weapon, there would be no problem of
weaponization. Many diseases cannot be
passed on to humans, so elaborate con-

The Department of Agriculture
and the Food and Drug Administration are working with
industries to assess their vulnerabilities. Their system is called
CARVER + Shock. CARVER
stands for criticality, accessibility,
recuperability, vulnerability,
effect and recognizability. In a
given operation, the system is
meant to assess the nodes that
could be contaminated, say a
tank in a processing plant. It
gets a score between 1 and 10
on each CARVER variable.
Criticality represents how
much public-health and economic impact there would be.
For example, a 100-gallon tank
making a product that will be
sold in 1-gallon containers could
kill about 100 people.
Recuperability refers to
how quickly a product might
recover; for instance, a fresh
product might regain confidence more quickly.
Vulnerability is high with
something like cider because
it's never pasteurized, just
packaged.
Effect is the amount of
direct loss: If a situation takes
out a whole system, trust in that
system would go down and the
effect would be great.
Recognizability is how easily a terrorist could know what
to do and where to go in a
given system.
The Shock part of the
equation is the actual word,
referring to the shock value of
an attack. "Contamination of
infant formula would be a full
10 shock," says Frank Busta,
director of the National Center
for Food Protection and
Defense. "Green onions just
wouldn't have the same effect."

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Meat + Poultry - September 2006

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