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How Fighting Terrorism Indirectly Affected the Food Supply

After 9/11, the federal government waged war on terrorism, but that fight has come at a cost to the nation’s food supply.

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After 9/11, the federal government waged war on terrorism, but that fight, according to some experts, has come at a cost to the nation’s food supply.

Citing a 2006 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the Associated Press reported that in 2003, the federal government reassigned more than 1,800 agricultural specialists to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), leaving the borders unprotected against invasive plants, produce and insects that threaten the food supply. Scientists say the move has cost billions of dollars in crop damage and eradication efforts.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) workers were reassigned and became employees of the DHS’ Customs and Border Protection (CBP). They were accustomed to dealing with pests and plants, not terrorists and weapons.

Even though the CBP had been tasked with fighting both terrorist and agricultural invasions — and had the personnel to do both — the office devoted the bulk of these resources to the terrorism portion. The result was that bugs in crates and fruits in passengers’ bags — ones that can wreak havoc — were introduced into the country.

Mark Hoddle, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, travels abroad studying invasive species, often on behalf of California government. “Everybody pays a price,” he said. “When we have an agricultural pest that comes in and establishes, it means growers have to apply more pesticides to control that pest. That increases environmental contamination; that means your food prices increase, so if you want to buy oranges or apples, you end up paying slightly more because management costs have increased.”

Troubling Invaders


More than 50,000 non-native plant and insect species have emerged in the United States, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting. Most have been harmless or beneficial, but some have been catastrophic, like these invaders:

  • The mildly toxic yellow star thistle from Eurasia has crowded out millions of acres of grass that cows graze on in the Western United States, crippling ranchers.
  • Quagga mussels from the Ukraine cover entire American landscapes with their shells, causing billions of dollars in damage to boats, docks and other property while clogging pipes and impeding flowing water inside.
  • Spartina grass is indigenous to multiple foreign countries, but in the American west, birds have trouble finding their food — insects and crustaceans — that becomes hidden in spartina that shouldn’t be there.

“Our crops and forests are always at risk when we’re dealing with new pests that might come in,” said Jeff Grode, assistant director for emergency and domestic programs at APHIS. His office focuses on how to handle invasive species that slip through the cracks. “Pests that are new to an environment can do damage because there aren’t natural enemies for many of them here.”

According to the GAO, in a typical inspection, travelers are questioned about their origins and destinations, and inspectors review their written declarations and screen luggage with dogs. If the inspectors still have doubts, they question a passenger more fully and examine luggage by hand search or X-ray.

But the organization also found fault with the agricultural inspection methods themselves and communication between inspection personnel. According to the report, the CBP didn’t adopt appropriate methods to gauge how well the agricultural quarantine inspection program performed, and not all inspectors received notifications about inspection alerts and policy changes.

Problems in the Fight


According to the GAO report, APHIS transferred 1,871 agricultural specialist positions, including 317 vacancies, and distributed them across 20 CBP field offices in 2003. The CBP created the “One Face at the Border” initiative that unified customs, integration and agricultural inspection duties under the same office. APHIS retained the responsibility to set the inspection policy that the CBP specialists must adhere to in the field. CBP officers and agricultural specialists were cross-trained to handle all tasks.

Agricultural specialists were suddenly required to work with gun-toting CBP agents, and the culture shock was intense. “Anytime you have a change like that, there’s some disruption,” Grode said, though he didn’t reference specific problems or incidents in detail.

Senior officials involved with the transfer told the GAO that the reassignments were done hastily with guesswork. Soon after the transfer of duties, APHIS created a staffing model to recommend how many agricultural specialists should go where. But the CBP didn’t follow it when assigning the more than 600 agricultural specialists who were hired during the transfer. Consequently the CBP couldn’t tell if the country’s most vulnerable areas had the appropriate level of staffing.

Perfecting Strategy


Hoddle has joined a project to assess just how pervasive the invasive species problem has been in California. The members include researchers from academia and the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

“We have a team that’s looking exactly at this issue to see what the invasion rates of exotic organisms into California have been over the last 22 years,” he said. “This will include data before and after 9/11.

We should be able to run statistical tests to determine whether the invasion rates into California are significantly different before and after that time.”

They want to come up with hard numbers to quantify the invasive species issue, and Hoddle said they expect to complete their work by spring 2012. In a testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in October 2011, Bruce Murley, CBP’s director of the port of Honolulu, spoke of changes to the CBP’s inspection methods, suggesting that the research carries weight for years after it was completed.

“I will outline CBP’s advancements over the past eight years, and the challenges we face every day,” he said.

These “corrective measures,” as Murley phrased them, included:

  • ensuring that urgent alerts are more effectively shared between the CBP and states;
     
  • giving agricultural specialists access to the CBP’s automated targeting system to identify high-risk shipments before they enter the country;
     
  • working with APHIS to create a quality assurance program that ensures ports carry out inspections within APHIS policies; and
     
  • creating the Joint Task Force in 2007, which is overseen by the Agriculture Quarantine Inspection Partnership Council, to evaluate agriculture programs’ effectiveness and recommend improvements.
Murley said the CBP will ensure that the “introduction of plant pests and foreign animal diseases is treated with the same rigor as all other mission areas.”

Hilton Collins is a GOVERNING contributor. He is a staff writer for Government Technology.
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