Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and is resistant to all fungicides yet developed. In 1996, the fungal
disease known as karnal bunt invaded the U.S. wheat belt, ruining more
than half of that year's crop and forcing the quarantine of more than
290,000 acres. A virulent new strain of the black stem wheat fungus
that destroyed 20 percent of the American wheat crop fi fty years ago
has spread from North Africa to India and is expected to invade the
United States soon. We do not yet know how to kill it. These naturally
occurring enemies of our crops evolve every now and then and cause
havoc in agricultural areas. Terrorists could easily “seed” America's
crops with such enemies.
Fungi are not the only fast-acting creatures that successfully attack
crops. Insects can also destroy crops with devastating speed, and spread
disease as well, facts that have frequently been noted by military strate-
gists. The French, German, Japanese, and American military establish-
ments have either contemplated or used food-eating beetles, plague-infected
fl eas, cholera-coated fl ies, and yellow fever-infected mosquitoes as
weapons. The dispersal and biting capacity of (uninfected) mosquitoes
was tested by the U.S. government during World War II by secretly
dropping them over U.S. cities. According to biodefense experts, a ter-
rorist with a few inexpensive supplies could introduce human disease
or crop enemies to the United States with almost no chance of being
caught.
There are recent examples of insect attacks on plants in the United
States not caused by terrorists. The Asian longhorned beetle, which
arrived in 1996, and the emerald ash borer, found in 2002, together
have the potential to destroy more than $700 billion worth of forests,
according to the USDA. This amount is twenty-fi ve times the direct
damage caused by the attacks of September 11, 2001. An insect-borne
disease that destroyed enough orchards to cut the sale of orange
juice by 50 percent for fi ve years would cost the U.S. economy $9.5
billion, approximately the cost of building the World Trade Center
from scratch.
The invasion of the incredibly fast-spreading Japanese kudzu plant in
the southeastern United States and the invasion of predatory organisms
loosed from the ballast of ships in the Great Lakes are other examples
of the damage that can be done to plants and animals by invasive foreign
species. About 40 percent of insect pests in the United States are nonna-
tive, as are 40 percent of our weeds and 70 percent of our plant patho-
gens.
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It takes little imagination to envision the devastation that could
be loosed in the United States by crop terrorists.
