Meat + Poultry - September 2006 - 57

What consumers think

safety you want will accentuate the difference. I don't know any way around that."
Proper defense of agriculture will
require funding to allow veterinary science
to study foreign animal diseases, Chalk says.
We also need diagnostic labs at the state
level, which is essential for earlier containment. He also suggests improving communication channels between producers and regulators and greater use of non-veterinarians
who deal with animals on daily basis.
"We can't erect a barrier to deal with diseases," Chalk says. "We need security in
depth rather than at the perimeter. Now
we're using a 16th-century conception of
sovereignty at the borders to deal with a
23rd-century problem."
A terrorist event is rare compared to
natural illness events; the latter will become
even more serious with increasing globalization. "If we decide to build a stockpile of
FMD vaccine, I'd do it because it will come
naturally," Breeze says. "The major vulnerability of agriculture is that if there were a
small number of cases of particular diseases,
the way we would respond would create
the very thing terrorists are looking for:
widespread slaughter. One way to solve the
problem would be to make a policy decision
that we won't do this anymore - then there
would be no point in attacking agriculture."
But, Breeze says, no government in the
world can solve this - agriculture and the
food industry need to solve this themselves.
"It all comes down to the responsibility
issue," he says. "Participants need to know
what to do." His suggestion for establishing
responsibility in the case of FMD: the first person to report it will get a cash award, as will
anyone reporting it in the next two weeks.
After that, everyone should have implemented steps to keep it off their own farm.
Science needs to help out in the
defense front, and the next steps in food
defense ought to come in the lab, Busta
says. "There's a tremendous need for
research on chemical and biological agents:
What happens to them in food systems?
How do they react to food processing?"
That kind of information would put us in a
better position to decide what to protect
against and how to test for it.
While most events have a probability

It's often been noted that consumers know little about how food gets
to their plates, so it is not surprising that there is a discrepancy when
consumers and industry attempt to pinpoint the food system's vulnerabilities. A study done by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University
showed that consumers thought the least-safe places were local grocery
stores, processing plants and the transportation sector. They believed
farms were the safest places in the food system. Fresh fruits and vegetables and meats were thought to be the most vulnerable, processed
foods the least vulnerable. The respondents found the idea of a purposeful contamination much more upsetting than anything accidental
that could happen.
"People believe their food supply is safe, but that may be because
they haven't had any reason to doubt it yet," says William Hallman,
director of the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University. "Agroterrorism would probably make them doubt what the industry and government are doing. We need to think about what consumers would do in
response. What would it take to regain consumer confidence?" Even
the Department of Homeland Security has taken on a behavioral scientist as a consultant, with the goal of answering that kind of question.

attached to them, terrorism is an asymmetric event, neither predictable nor actuarial.
That makes it more of a challenge to put
enough effort into hardening the targets
and demonstrating the real value on investment. "Hardening is not cheap," Busta says.
"There are some people who wish the government would mandate it so it would be a
level playing field." That way everyone
would be facing the same costs.
There's also this fact to contend with:
No amount of defenses will ever eliminate
the risk. Terrorism is designed to terrorize,
and anything involved in the food supply -
which we cannot live without - will always
have that potential. ■
By Suzanne B. Bopp
Drovers magazine

SEPTEMBER 2006 FOOD SYSTEMS ınsıder FSI

Meat + Poultry - September 2006

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