ROME, June 13 (UPI) -- Delegates at the United Nations Food Summit on Wednesday called for steps to prevent food networks from becoming targets of terror groups, including closer monitoring of food supplies and rapid action plans to remove potentially contaminated goods from markets.
The meeting, hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and featuring representatives from more than 150 countries, officially is being held to discuss ways nations can act on an earlier pledge to reduce by one-half the number of starving people, estimated at 850 million, by 2015.
Delegates said, however, the issue of food security has been a hot topic on the summit's sidelines.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who opened the four-day talks on Monday, was the first to make a connection between food supply and terror groups, calling food supply risks a potential "Achilles heel" in the U.S.-led war against terror.
"Food security and steps that should be taken against terror groups are not officially on the agenda, but it seems like they are," Peruvian delegate Mario Belaunde told United Press International. "Many, many people are discussing the topics here."
Alan Randell, director of Codex Alimentarius, a food rules organization jointly funded by FAO and the World Health Organization, said based on discussions held at the World Food Summit so far, international recommendations were being drawn up that fall broadly into two main areas: closer monitoring of food supplies and an infrastructure that would allow rapid steps to be taken if a danger is discovered.
"We are encouraging countries to develop baseline values for their food supply and to monitor it closely to determine if there is any risk or contamination," Randell told UPI. "Most developed countries already have that baseline information in place and poorer countries without it are less likely to be terror targets, so that's less of a problem. Where we could see improvement is in the processes used to recall problem products rapidly if a problem is discovered."
Randell and several other delegates noted a case in the late 1980s when a few hundred Israeli oranges were laced with mercury. Although the contaminated fruit resulted in only a handful of sick people, it caused a panic that effectively shut down the Israeli citrus trade for several months and cost growers there tens of millions of dollars.
"The main risk is not that an attack on the food supply by some terror group will result in hundreds or thousands of casualties as the attack on Sept. 11 did," Paolo Agostini, an Italian Ministry of Agriculture official, told UPI. "The risk is that such a move could cause a panic that would undermine a country's stability."
One factor inhibiting consensus on the issue is only two wealthy countries, Italy and Spain, sent official delegations to the talks. Some of the most pressing food security issues -- such as responsibility for the security and safety of food supplies produced in one country, transported through another and consumed in a third -- therefore cannot be adequately addressed.
