How Safe Is Your Food? Not Very.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One of the deepest fears sweeping a shattered nation following the Sept. 11 attacks was that terrorists might poison the country’s food.
Hoping to ease people’s anxieties about what they were eating, President George W. Bush vowed to draw a protective shield around the food supply and defend it from farm to fork.
An Associated Press analysis of the programs found that the government has spent at least $3.4 billion on food counter-terrorism in the last decade, but key programs have been bogged down in a huge, multi-headed bureaucracy. And with no single agency in charge, officials acknowledge it’s impossible to measure whether orchards or feedlots are actually any safer.
On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine a congressional watchdog’s new report revealing federal setbacks in protecting cattle and crops since Sept. 11. Just days after the 10th anniversary of the attacks, lawmakers are demanding answers about potential food-related threats and reports that the government could have wasted money on languishing agriculture anti-terror programs.
“The truth is, nobody’s in charge,” said John Hoffman, a former senior adviser for bio-surveillance and food defense at the Department of Homeland Security, who will testify at the hearing. “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.”
Top U.S. food defense authorities insist that the initiatives have made the food supply safer and say extensive investments have prepared the country to respond to emergencies. No terrorist group has threatened the food supply in the past decade, and the largest food poisonings have not arisen from foreign attacks but from salmonella-tainted eggs produced on Iowa farms that sickened almost 2,000 people.