Description of Issues

Food defense, as used in this chapter, relates to the intentional adulteration of the food supply. While governments have begun to take action to mitigate this risk only in recent years, people have been poisoning food since before the pyramids were built.

What is different today is the scale of the impact and the scope of the risk (Tumin, 2009). Modern agricultural methods, large scale food manufacturing, and efficient logistics turn what might only have been a local problem into an international crisis. A single farming region may produce a commodity for much of a nation. A single factory may manufacture food that is distributed across a continent, or produce an ingredient shipped around the world (Cavallero et al., 2011).

At the same time, terrorist attacks that reach across the world, increased global political unrest, and unprecedented global distribution of food magnify the risk. No longer must we be concerned with only personal enemies, but we must also be concerned about extremist political factions with whom we have no contact. The potential risk could be with a trading partner half a world away.