Global Security Newswire

The U.S. government in the last 10 years has spent a minimum of $3.4 billion on efforts to counter a potential food-borne terrorist attack, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday (see GSN, April 29).

Despite that funding, efforts to defend the U.S. food supply have been undermined by an enormous bureaucratic web encompassing various branched of government, according to AP. As no single department has been appointed to head up food security efforts, officials admit there is no way of knowing to what level U.S. food supply chains are secured against terrorist machinations.

A Senate subcommittee on Tuesday was scheduled to assess the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report that found significant problems in U.S. efforts to safeguard produce and cattle from deliberate poisoning by extremists.

"The truth is, nobody's in charge," one-time Homeland Security Department biosurveillance and food security adviser John Hoffman said. "Our surveillance doesn't work yet, our intelligence doesn't work yet, and we're not doing so well at targeting what comes across the border."

Senior U.S. food security officials maintain that defense programs have ensured a safe food chain and that the United States has contingency plans to counteract any such threats. There has been no food tainting attempt in the last 10 years.

Federal auditors have determined that a biosurveillance initiative called the Food Emergency Response Network that was designed to identify the presence of chemical, biological and radiological contaminants had not been improperly implemented half a decade after its launch. There is a lack of agreement between the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department on which agency should lead the program.

Lawmakers in Washington are raising concerns about the efficacy of a $31 million DHS initiative to build a cutting-edge database for the cross-agency exchange of real-time information on disease, agriculture, food and environmental surveillance as government offices have not utilized the database.

Representative Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) has drafted legislation that would do away with the database.

"It just didn't work," said ex-DHS chief medical officer Jeff Runge of the database. "Now al-Qaeda is headed by a physician [Ayman al-Zawahiri] who has expressed interest in biological attacks, and I don't think we are putting enough brain cycles on this issue."

The Homeland Security Department is attempting to improve the database's usefulness by analyzing the "challenges and opportunities of integrated biosurveillance," a DHS official said.

Private businesses are not required to undertake many of the food defense advisements called for by the federal government.

"Everything that has been done to date on food defense in the private sector has all been voluntary," Food and Drug Administration policy adviser LeeAnne Jackson said. "We can't go out and ask them what they have done, because they're not obliged to tell us, so we don't have a good metric to measure what's been done."

In the last six years, the Food and Drug Administration has paid out $1.3 billion on initiatives to prevent terrorist efforts against the food supply, according to spokeswoman Patricia el-Hinnawy. The Agriculture Department, meanwhile, since 2003 has spent $1.64 billion on food security.

One triumph in food defense efforts is a $6 million initiative based out of Iowa that supports veterinarians in halting the spread of viruses from herd to herd. Another success is an initiative that supplied California dairy farms with financing to purchase specialized locks for their milking sheds to keep their cows secure (Garance Burke, Associated Press/Washington Times, Sept. 13).