Agro-terrorism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term Agro-terrorism is a controversial neologism used to describe threats by a terrorist act on the food chain.
From a BBC article on the subject: When Tommy Thompson stood down as US health secretary in 2004, he delivered a stark warning. "I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do," he said.
In the same article, Larry Wein from Stanford University describes the scenario of poisoning a milk tanker with 10 grams of botulinum toxin, and is quoted concluding: "If we didn't realise what was happening, half a million people would drink this milk... most of these would be poisoned, roughly half of them would die"
A terrorist attack on the food chain on that scale has never happened. The purported ease with which such an attack could be executed is controversial.
