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U.S. States Ramping Up Agricultural Monitoring for Terrorism Defense; Federal Response Slow By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — State governments concerned that terrorists could attack the U.S. food chain are rapidly intensifying their efforts to collect and integrate information on agriculture and related fields (see GSN, Dec. 15). Their work involves collecting information on farms, markets and other points in the supply chain with an eye toward early detection of any terrorist attempt to poison or otherwise sabotage animal or plant products. Ad-hoc coordination of the programs among states is becoming commonplace, but no effective national coordination yet exists despite the existence of presidential directives on the subject, according to state officials. “Agriculture is up and coming, as far as we’re concerned, for terrorism,” West Virginia Military Affairs and Public Safety Secretary Christine Farris Morris said this month at a meeting of state officials in Baltimore. “There’s so much going on” at the state level, added antiterrorism expert Bob Ehart of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, “that it’s hard to summarize.” North Carolina has become a leader among states engaged in the effort, according to officials from several states. “From a long-term perspective, North Carolina is clearly the leader,” Ehart said. The state maintains a secure online trove of information, the Multihazard Threat Database, which includes input from health, agriculture, justice and other agencies and is coordinated with satellite maps and other advanced geographic systems. “The walls [between state agencies] come down as being barriers for that information,” Information Support Services Director David Wray of the state Agriculture Department’s Emergency Programs Division said in an interview this week. “If the poop does hit the fan, we’ll be able to react, or respond.” The department contributes to the multiagency database both with information on food contamination incidents and with basic supply-chain information, such as locations of supermarkets and farms. Such data is combined with other agencies’ information — on police stations, hospital admissions or land use, for example — and correlated with the state’s Geographic Information System, which is housed at the Agriculture Department and draws on satellite mapping technology. State officials hope improving farm and market information and combining it with reports of suspicious activity or information about hospital patients could allow them to detect an agricultural terrorist attack in progress. Farris Morris, who has consulted with North Carolina officials in hopes of improving West Virginia’s agricultural defenses, said the goal is to maintain accurate, basic information that would form the foundation for any response to a terrorist attack on the sector. “We can’t respond to agroterrorism if we don’t know where the farms are,” she said. Outbreaks in agriculture not only could result from direct terrorist attacks on the food supply but also could serve as early indications that pathogens are in the air or water, Wray said. “One thing that animals are is sentinels for the human population,” Wray said. In many bioterrorism events, he said, “Your animals are going to be affected before the human population is.” “The future of this is to be able to have a canary in a coal mine, using information technology as your canary in the coal mine, so to speak,” Wray said. Officials from states including West Virginia, Minnesota and Michigan — as well as representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency — have been visiting North Carolina to learn about the threat database, which Wray said has been built “with minimal cost.” “We’re sharing a lot of the information with whoever wants to listen,” Wray said. “You could use it as a model for other states to use.” In an interview this week, Ehart said a “disjointed funding mechanism” in the early days of the federal Homeland Security Department limited grants to states for agricultural purposes but that more and more states are joining the agriculture-protection effort as additional money becomes available for the programs. The federal government has provided about $500,000 so far for the North Carolina database, according to Wray. As of next year, Washington is also seeking to make new Homeland Security grants for agriculture contingent on states’ submission of statewide vulnerability assessments. Despite increased grants and improved targeting of the funds, however, state information is not feeding into any coordinated national system, potentially limiting its usefulness in defending against terrorism. “I would not say that there is an infrastructure in place, that the whole United States is able to do that at this point,” Ehart said. The general direction and effectiveness of federal efforts to protect the U.S. food supply have come into question of late amid resignations of top officials in the effort. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman is stepping down after putting antiterrorism for the first time at the center of her department’s agenda, and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson used his resignation announcement early this month to issue a warning about food security. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do,” Thompson said Dec. 3. President George W. Bush has ordered improvements, including in the collection and analysis of states’ information, but the pace of federal progress is questionable, according to experts and state officials. A January 2004 presidential directive set a federal policy of “identifying and prioritizing sector-critical infrastructure and key resources for establishing protection requirements” in agriculture and “developing awareness and early warning capabilities to recognize threats.” The directive required the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies to “develop robust, comprehensive and fully coordinated surveillance and monitoring systems” on animal and plant disease and food and water security, as well as to “develop and enhance intelligence operations and analysis capabilities focusing on the agriculture, food and water sectors.” The Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Agriculture departments were instructed to “expand and continue vulnerability assessments of the agriculture and food sectors.” At House of Representatives subcommittee hearing four months later, however, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Infrastructure Protection Robert Liscouski said there was no federal timeline for implementing the directive “because that plan is in process.” A spokeswoman for Representative Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.), who at the hearing asked Liscouski to “get back to me” later on the timeline, said yesterday that the two have spoken about the matter since then but that she still knows of no schedule for the effort. Other post-Sept. 11, 2001, federal initiatives on agricultural security include a new surveillance unit in the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which the department said in April will “provide a focal point for the collection, processing and delivery of surveillance information that is needed in order to make risk analyses and take action,” and a plan for the department to conduct vulnerability assessments of domestic and imported food. As such efforts struggle to get on their feet, however, states are already moving forward with their own initiatives to improve potentially crucial information about agriculture. “Every state is allowed to go its own way, at some level,” RAND Corp. Senior Policy Analyst Mark Bernstein, who has written on agricultural terrorism, said this week in an interview. “Things have moved pretty slowly in terms of getting a system in place to share that information.” Bernstein said that despite the disparate nature of state efforts around the country, current technology should allow the federal government to integrate the systems in a comprehensive, standardized way once it gets organized to do so. He called such an effort vital to agricultural security. “What we need to do is a comprehensive assessment,” he said.
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