The FBI is currently hosting the second annual International Symposium on Agroterrorism. What is this all about you might ask? From the perspective of the FBI, the symposium is about looking at potential terror threats and vulnerabilities to crops and lovestock. It is, I believe, a part of the Bush Administration’s effort to expand the rhetoric of war and fear into our food system.

A key term that is being used at the symposium is “food safety”. The FBI’s defintion of food safety is very different from the definition used by community groups working to ensure reliable and safe access to healthy and affordable food for their community. The FBI’s definition and rhetoric, while focused on the challenges of terror to our food system, does not address the fact that millions of Americans go with out food security and food safety everyday.

This symposium is also about how to further militarize our agricultural systems. Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, talks about how modern agriculture is a type of violence or warfare on the earth through the use of machinery, chemicals (pesticides were originally developed by the Nazis for their death camps) and other methods that essentially attack eco-systems. The FBI’s symposium is a direct outgrowth of an agricultural paradigm of using methods of warfare to grow food. Those of us who are trying to use food and agriculture for social change, for addressing the needs of our communities and healing ourselves, this symposium symbolizes the amount of work we have to do to bring humanity back into a balanced relationship with the earth and our food systems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 2:05 pm and is filed under People's Grocery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.