Food Defence: The Securitisation of the Food Supply

Defesa dos alimentos: A securitização do suprimento de alimentos

Abstract

The notion of food defence emerged in the USA following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, reflecting the idea that the food sector constitutes a critical infrastructure for national security and that the food system must be defended against intentional acts, motivated by political or ideological reasons, that could cause large-scale damage to public health or the economy. This study draws on primary documentary sources on food defence, including government guidelines, laws, norms and regulations issued mainly in the USA, as well as secondary bibliographic sources related to the topic, and draws on insights from securitisation theory in order to show that food defence discourses, norms, guidelines and practices connect to a process of social construction of threats and risks, linked to the frameworks of bioterrorism and biodefence, subjecting the food sector to a process of securitisation. Based on this analysis, we aim to contribute, firstly, by deepening the problematisation of food defence, adding to the debate a political and security dimension. Without this discussion, we argue it is not possible to understand, rigorously and accurately, food defence’s defining core and its specificities within the conceptual constellation of food protection. Secondly, by resorting to the food defence case, we hope to contribute empirically to illustrate an expanded version of securitisation, drawing attention to the importance of a more eclectic and integrated look at the discursive and non-discursive aspects and the different logics that operate in the social construction of security.

Keywords
biodefence; bioterrorism; food defence; securitization; food terrorism; food protection

Resumo

A noção de defesa alimentar surgiu nos EUA após os ataques terroristas de 11 de setembro de 2001, refletindo a ideia de que o setor alimentício constitui uma infraestrutura crítica para a segurança nacional e que o sistema alimentar deve ser defendido contra atos intencionais, motivados por razões políticas ou ideológicas, que possam causar danos em larga escala à saúde pública ou à economia. Este estudo baseia-se em fontes documentais primárias sobre defesa alimentar, incluindo diretrizes governamentais, leis, normas e regulamentos emitidos principalmente nos EUA, bem como em fontes bibliográficas secundárias relacionadas ao tema, e utiliza insights da teoria da securitização para mostrar que discursos, normas, diretrizes e práticas de defesa alimentar se conectam a um processo de construção social de ameaças e riscos, vinculado aos quadros de bioterrorismo e biodefesa, submetendo o setor alimentício a um processo de securitização. Com base nesta análise, buscamos contribuir, em primeiro lugar, aprofundando a problematização da defesa alimentar, adicionando ao debate uma dimensão política e de segurança. Sem essa discussão, argumentamos que não é possível compreender, de forma rigorosa e precisa, o núcleo definidor da defesa alimentar e suas especificidades dentro da constelação conceitual da proteção alimentar. Em segundo lugar, ao recorrer ao caso da defesa alimentar, esperamos contribuir empiricamente para ilustrar uma versão ampliada da securitização, chamando a atenção para a importância de uma visão mais eclética e integrada sobre os aspectos discursivos e não discursivos e as diferentes lógicas que operam na construção social da segurança.

Palavras-chave
biodefesa; bioterrorismo; defesa alimentar; securitização; terrorismo alimentar; proteção alimentar

Introduction

The term food defence emerged in the USA after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, designating the idea that the food sector is a critical infrastructure for national security and that food supply chains should be defended against intentional acts, politically or ideologically motivated, that can cause large-scale damage to public health or the economy (DHS/USDA/FDA 2011; FDA/USDA/DHS 2015). Incorporated into US government policies and the food industry’s vocabulary, this concept has triggered several legal, institutional, technical, and operational developments, introducing new concerns into the field of food protection. Given its underlying political preoccupation, the notion of food defence has conceptual contours that go beyond those associated with the concepts of food quality (related to the positive and negative attributes that affect consumer perceptions of what is acceptable in food appearance, texture, flavour, nutritional content, etc.), food fraud (related to deliberate practices of food adulteration for economic gain), food safety (related to the reduction of risks of unintentional contamination due to natural or accidental events, negligence or violation of procedures due to technical ignorance), and food security (related to the physical, social, and economic access of people to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to sustain a healthy and active life).

Within the academic debate, discussions on food defence have mainly focused on the conceptual delineation and technological, institutional, regulatory and operational developments of this concept, highlighting aspects such as: definition of food defence and specification of its technical characteristics within food protection’s conceptual constellation (Fredrickson 2014; Manning and Mei Soon 2016; Wallace, Sperber and Mortimore 2018: 265-282); description of pathogens that can be used for malicious contamination of food and identification of historical cases of deliberate poisoning of foods and beverages (Dalziel 2009; Jurica, Vrdoljak and Karačonji 2019); vulnerabilities and critical points of food supply chains (Jurica, Vrdoljak and Karačonji 2019); development and implementation of systems, tools, mathematical modelling, and methods for risk and threat assessment, attack prevention, damage mitigation and response capacity in agriculture and the food industry (Buchanan and Appel 2010); regulations, standards, requirements and certification processes of food defence (Wallace and Oria 2010; Bogadi, Banovic and Babic 2016; Severino 2016; Fortin 2016); and general panoramas of all the previous aspects (Severino and Almeida 2017; Moerman 2018; Andrade, Oliveira and Freitas 2021).

This article takes as a starting point the path opened by this debate but goes in a different direction. This study’s central argument is that the notion of food defence is not exhausted in its technical and operational dimension but reveals its greatest particularity and novelty in the way the narratives and practices of food defence make the food sector a security problem. In other words, the article highlights the security dimension of food defence, arguing that this aspect is what particularises this concept within the field of food protection. In this sense, we argue that this conceptual category and its practical developments are part of a broader frame of reference that needs to be examined in order to understand, with greater rigour and depth, how discourses, norms, guidelines and practices of food defence are connected to a process of social construction of threats and risks, originally linked to the broader frameworks of bioterrorism and biodefence engendered mainly around US concerns, subjecting the management of the food sector to a militarised language and a logic that is specific to security problems.

To advance this argument, we draw on primary documentary sources on food defence, including government guidelines, laws, rules, and regulations, issued mainly in the USA, as well as secondary bibliographic sources related to the topic, in order to examine empirically how the food sector has been constructed as a security problem since the 1990s. As a theoretical framework, we draw on the insights into the social construction of security provided by securitisation theory. Initially proposed by scholars linked to the so-called Copenhagen School (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998), the concept of securitisation emphasises the ‘inherently political nature of any designation of security issues’ (Wæver 2011: 468), regardless of the objective and substantive nature of these issues, which allows for the consideration that any topic can be treated as a security problem if it is articulated within a successful process of threat construction. This process, which according to the Copenhagen School occurs intersubjectively through political discourse, constructs for certain issues a shared sense of threat that socially legitimises the adoption of exceptional and emergency measures to manage the problem.

From this perspective, one can understand how security sometimes moves beyond the military sector¹ by projecting its ‘threat-defence’ logic into other sectors of social life – as observed, for example, with issues of crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, epidemics, migration, poverty, the environment, etc. The result of these processes of securitisation in the contemporary world is an expanded agenda of security that goes beyond its traditional military focus (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 2-5).

When analysing the securitisation of food supply, we acknowledge the important contributions of the Copenhagen School’s theorists (with their emphasis on the dramatic and exceptional grammar of discursive politics in the social construction of threats), but also engage with the critical debate that proposes a revision and a refinement of securitisation theory’s original assumptions. In this way, we seek to show that the Copenhagen School’s theoretical insights, although relevant, are insufficient to elucidate how the securitisation of the food sector occurs within a broader empirical framework. Thus, besides acknowledging the discursive and exceptional politics of food defence, we go a step further by arguing that technical orientations, physical arrangements and everyday procedures of risk management linked to food defence are also relevant to understand how the food sector has been securitised.

Relying on this approach, we aim to contribute, firstly, by deepening the problematisation of food defence, adding to the debate a political and security dimension. Without this discussion, we argue it is not possible to understand, rigorously and accurately, food defence’s defining core and its specificities within the conceptual constellation of food protection. Secondly, by resorting to the food defence case, we hope to contribute empirically to illustrate an expanded version of securitisation, drawing attention to the importance of a more eclectic and integrated look at the discursive and non-discursive aspects and the different logics that operate in the social construction of security.

To develop this analysis, the article is divided into four sections. The first section explores the debate on securitisation, seeking a theoretical framework that contributes to the analysis of the theme raised in the article. The second section examines some antecedents of the food defence debate, especially the emergence of bioterrorism as an existential threat in US political discourse, and the implications for the food sector. The third section focuses on the emergence and development of food defence’s discourses and practices, aiming to show how these elements constitute a process of securitisation of food supply. The fourth section finally discusses the logics and dynamics observed in this securitisation process and their implications for understanding the notion of food defence and the revision of securitisation theory.

Expanding the theoretical debate on securitisation

For theorists of the so-called Copenhagen School, security problems are socially constructed through political discourse, following a linguistic process designated by the term securitisation (Wæver 1995; Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998). By producing a specific type of discourse that equates a given issue as an existential threat – that is, as an extreme danger that menaces the very existence of a socially esteemed and valued object (e.g., the state, life, health of the population, the environment, or national subsistence stocks, including water or food, as we aim to show) – a securitising actor, usually speaking from a position of power, tries to convince a relevant audience on the need for emergency and exceptional measures to contain the development of the threat (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 23-26). It is within this discursive process, negotiated between the securitising actor and the audience, that a security problem emerges. And this process occurs through the construction of a socially shared sense of threat against which defence measures are justified. The effect of this ‘threat-defence’ binomial is the social legitimisation of an emergency, priority, and exceptional mode of problem management, often associated with breaking the rules of the normal democratic political game (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998).

For the Copenhagen School, therefore, the quality of security is not predefined by the nature of the threat, but is supplied by politics (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 32). This means that the construction of what is socially accepted as a security problem does not necessarily depend on the essential, natural, and objective characteristics of the threat (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 24, 29-31). It is the reproduction of a dramatized political discourse, inherited from the traditional rhetoric of national security and defence and the extreme logic of war, that gives certain issues a sense of threat and creates a condition of emergency that justifies extraordinary measures to manage them (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 23-26).

Thus, as originally conceived by the Copenhagen School, securitisation emphasises the political process of threat construction, and its conceptual contours are based on two essential elements: its discursive emphasis, grounded in a blend of speech act theory and post-structuralist theory of language (Oliveira 2018: 504); and its grammar of extremity and emergency, derived from the logic of war inherited from traditional conceptions of security and a Carl Schmitt-inspired understanding of the concept of sovereignty as an act of decision – which some authors call, following Michael C. Williams (2003: 516), the ‘decisionist theory of sovereignty’. Due to these intellectual roots, the Copenhagen School’s conception of securitisation is exclusively defined by discursive and exceptional practices, usually related to the decisionism of those in formal positions of power, thus characterising ‘an elitist vision of politics’ (Huysmans 2011: 375). This means that the central elements for understanding the process of securitisation are situated at the level of high politics and the speech acts of those who represent, to some extent, sovereign power – hence the Copenhagen School’s emphasis on securitisation occurring at the level of the state, where, according to its theorists, the necessary elements for successful securitisation are best situated (Buzan, Wӕver and de Wilde 1998: 36-37).

Several authors have critically engaged in this debate, arguing that the Copenhagen School’s articulation of securitisation with speech acts and exceptionalism leads to a reductionist understanding of the social construction of security. For this reason, these critics call for a revision and refinement of securitisation theory to encompass equally relevant alternative securitising logics and practices that are neglected by the Copenhagen School. In this internal debate, scholars associated with what has been labelled the Paris School (Bigo 2006, 2007, 2008, 2013, 2019; Bigo and Tsoukala 2008) have focused on networks of security experts (police, private security guards, migration officers, border guards, intelligence community, etc.), highlighting the impact of their everyday practices and exchange of information on the securitisation of migration, terrorism, drug trafficking, organised crime, etc. As Didier Bigo (2013: 121-122) notes, these experts’ routines, although productive in the way security problems are constructed and reproduced, are detached from the discursive politics and exceptional claims made by powerful elites trying to convince an audience of the legitimacy of their security decisions (Bigo 2013: 121-122). From this perspective, securitisation occurs at the micro level of the everyday practices of security professionals, whose activities assume a certain autonomy and a bureaucratic logic that escape the discursive, decisionism and exceptionalist features that characterise the Copenhagen School’s framework of analysis.

Jef Huysmans (2011) is also among the critics of the original conception of securitisation, arguing that this process is not summed up by a dramatic, spectacular, and exceptional speech act, but is constituted instead by a multiplicity of ‘small security nothings’ – i.e. by banal practices such as techniques and devices of surveillance, risk management and preventive governance, often repeated automatically, which in isolation may seem unpretentious, but when taken together play a relevant role in securitisation processes (2011: 376). Other scholars reinforce the argument that routine risk management as much as exceptional threat management matters for securitisation. Julia Trombeta (2011), looking specifically at the environmental sector, notes that the construction of security in this sector is based more on ‘prevention, risk management and resilience’ than on the ‘logic of emergency and exception’ (2011: 143). Mark Salter (2008) also emphasises the logic of specialised risk management in the securitisation of the circulation of people, noting that the way procedures, routines, practices and institutions are bureaucratically organised in airports, for example, is crucial to the constitution of what is defined as security problems.

What is important to note in these efforts to revise and refine securitisation theory is the observation that security problems do not result exclusively from a politics of emergency and exception, based on the construction of existential threats by speech acts of elites speaking from a position of sovereign power, but also occurs at the micro-level of risk management (Aradau, Lobo-Guerrero and Van Munster 2008: 148). According to Aradau and Van Munster (2007), the ways in which risks and threats operate in the construction of security are different: while the notion of threat triggers a logic of urgency and exceptionality in the justification of responses, involving the highest levels of political decision, the notion of risk triggers a logic of precaution, involving routines, reports, and bureaucratic procedures at the micro-level of everyday practices of professional managers of unease.

The difference between threat management and risk management can thus be translated into the difference between exceptionality and routine, in the sense that risk management operates through standardised preventive measures and precautionary procedures, while existential threat management, as defined by the Copenhagen School, operates through high-level decisions and the justification of exceptional measures that escape everyday practices. For Aradau and Van Munster (2007: 107), these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, so they can converge or overlap in the social construction of security. Thus, the decisionism and urgency of existential threat management may coexist with the everyday routines, habits and practices of police, immigration officials, insurance agents, intelligence community members and other professionals who are part of the social apparatus involved in risk management.

Within this debate, Rita Floyd (2015, 2019a) and Gilberto Oliveira (2018) question the purely textual and self-referential character of the Copenhagen School’s framework of analysis, arguing that policy and behavioural change (Floyd 2015: 8-9, 10-11; 2019a: 187) and effects of the securitising move for the governance of the issue constructed as security problem (Oliveira 2018) should take centre stage in the analysis of securitisation, especially when assessing the success or failure of the securitisation process. This implies, from a methodological point of view, recognising some kind of causality in securitisation, albeit in a post-positivist sense, that allows one to perceive the relationship between the securitisation move and the resulting actions, behaviours, and policy changes (Floyd 2010: 188- 189; Oliveira 2018).

Thus, rather than considering, as the Copenhagen School advocates (Buzan, Wӕver and de Wilde 1998: 26), that securitisation is shown internally in the discursive domain and is completed intersubjectively when the audience accepts the exceptional measures proposed by the securitising actor (which is complicated to assess given the Copenhagen School’s abstract notion of audience and the difficulties involved in its empirical identification), a more productive approach is to consider, as Floyd suggests, that ‘a securitisation is successful simply when it is brought into existence’ (2010: 54) – that is, when it results in policy or behavioural change. From this perspective, the textual analysis emphasised by the Copenhagen School may not be sufficient to characterise a successful securitisation process. After all, the success of securitisation cannot be attested abstractly as a result of the textual interpretation made by the analyst, but occurs when concrete actions and changes, connected through some causal complex with the securitising move (which may involve discursive and non-discursive practices, as well as exceptional claims and routine procedures), can be empirically assessed in the governance of the issue constructed as a threat (Oliveira 2018).

Within these efforts to revise and refine securitisation theory, Thierry Balzacq (2011, 2019) advances what he calls a sociological approach to securitisation. Moving beyond the textual and post-structuralist focus of the Copenhagen School’s approach, Balzacq’s sociological alternative does not ignore discursive practices, but emphasises context, the role of an empirically identified audience, and the non-discursive aspects of securitisation processes. From this perspective, the author advocates reconciliation between linguistic and non-linguistic dimensions (Balzacq, Léonard and Ruzicka 2016: 517), suggesting a more holistic and integrated approach that goes beyond ‘sterile dichotomies’ in the analysis of securitisation (Balzacq 2019: 348). In a similar vein, Bourbeau (2014) considers that perspectives emphasising the logic of exception and the logic of routine are not mutually exclusive, suggesting an approach that recognises the strengths of each and the contributions both frameworks offer to understand securitisation.

An additional aspect to consider within these internal developments of the securitisation debate is the engagement of some authors with the application of this theoretical framework to issues and sectors not conventionally considered as referents of security, or little explored in securitisation studies, such as global health (Elbe 2010, 2018), the environment (Floyd 2010, 2022) or the economic sector (Floyd 2019a). Although these authors’ insights cannot be detailed within the limits of this article, there are some important aspects to highlight. One such aspect is the realisation that different logics may operate in each sector. Rita Floyd (2019a), for example, notes that the construction of threats in the economic sector does not necessarily include extraordinary countermeasures, but rather can occur below the level of exception, preserving the rules of the game. Another aspect, somewhat shared by Elbe and Floyd, has to do with the need to open securitisation studies to normative assessment, especially when threat constructions occur in non-traditional security sectors. As Floyd (2010: 192; 2019b) emphasises, securitisation may not be just – i.e., may not be morally permissive – which raises important questions about the normative implications of security constructions. For Elbe (2010), the securitisation of health issues, as notably shown in the international response to infectious diseases, may in principle indicate positive mobilisation and allocation of resources, but also produce a negative global effect that should be noted, such as the selfish race of rich states to access and concentrate stocks of medicines and medical technologies. According to Elbe, this race produces the weakening of existing health mechanisms of international cooperation, contributing to deepen inequalities in access to health care between developed and developing countries.

In sum, despite the variety of questions, topics and metatheoretical bases of the aforementioned approaches, the crucial point for the analytical purposes of this study is that while it is important to consider the discursive dimension and the logic of exception of securitisation processes, it is also important to broaden this conception to encompass other logics and dynamics involved in the social construction of security. Thus, rather than considering rigid and polarised perspectives between discursive and non-discursive practices, between exceptional and routine measures, or between threat and risk management approaches, we assume that a more comprehensive and integrated view is more productive for analysing the social construction of security.

In view of this broader approach to securitisation, the analysis proposed in this article will be operationalised not only by examining the discourses and measures proposed by decision-making elites, mainly in the USA, which have led to the construction of the food sector as an urgent and exceptional security problem and to the emergence of the notion of food defence, but also by analysing how routine practices and specialised exchanges between agencies and actors directly involved in food protection have reproduced and reinforced the notion of food defence and kept the food sector under the logic of security. With this approach in mind, a closer look at the consequences of securitisation in terms of behavioural and policy change (including norms, laws, regulations, and public policies) provide a more adequate framework for analysing securitisation and assessing whether this process has been successful.

From bioterrorism to food defence

Biological threats and the potential for using bacteria, viruses and fungi, as well as the toxins produced by these organisms, to cause intentional harm, including through food contamination, are not particularly new concerns. Occurrences of this kind have been recorded in history (Dalziel 2009), and during the Cold War had already influenced military biodefence doctrines, particularly in the USA. Despite this background, concerns about biological weapons failed to produce, as Frank Smith (2014) notes, results that went beyond the old military mantra of contamination prevention, physical protection and decontamination as a generic recipe for defence against NBCR (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological) weapons.

This picture changed in the 1990s, when a new way of perceiving and interpreting the biological threat brought biodefence into a civilian and biomedical framework, strongly fuelled by the scientific community and fostered by public resources for research. The construction of narratives that led to this shift in focus can be traced to several reports that emerged in the scientific community, especially in the 1990s, which began to articulate not only the idea that emerging infectious diseases were becoming a threat to the USA, but also the argument that the Iraqi biological weapons programme, which had gained notoriety during the Gulf War, increased the possibility that the US population would suffer a biological attack conducted by terrorist groups, without the country being adequately prepared to defend itself against this threat (Smith 2014, 108-109). While these initial steps in building a nexus between infectious diseases and bioterrorism were taken during the Gulf War in 1991, it was President Bill Clinton, in the mid-1990s, who incorporated the narrative, already shared by security circles and the US media, that bioterrorism was emerging as a ‘catastrophic threat’. This led him to form a robust team of civilian advisors with expertise in biology and biotechnology to formulate a new biodefence policy (Wright 2004: 58-59, 63).

These developments contributed to create a climate of ‘imminent biological apocalypse’ that culminated in the US presidential directive, issued in 1995, whereby the Clinton administration pledged to give bioterrorism as well as terrorism using nuclear and chemical weapons ‘the highest priority’ (Wright 2004: 59). The result was the massive involvement of civilian agencies and the scientific community, under the leadership of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in biodefence efforts. This led the HHS Secretary to declare in late 1999 that it was ‘the first time in American history in which the public health system has been integrated directly into the national security system’ (Wright 2004: 60).

Thus, as Susan Wright (2004: 61) notes, the foundations of biodefence, inherited from the Clinton administration, were already well established when the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 and the spread of anthrax spores through the US postal service occurred. With the identification of supposed evidence of al-Qaeda’s interest in plant and animal diseases from written material found by US intelligence agents at a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan in late 2001, fears grew in the USA that possible plans for a biological attack on American agriculture were on the horizon (Dalziel 2009: 4). In addition to these aspects, a dramatic discourse by the Bush administration emerged in 2002, trying to convince not only the US population, but also other countries and the United Nations (UN) that Iraq’s alleged biological weapons programme was a global existential threat, due to the possibility that such weapons would be made available to terrorist groups supported by Saddam Hussein’s regime (Bush 2002).

It can be seen from this empirical narrative that the revival of the US biodefence programme, predominantly led by civilian agencies and supported by the scientific community in the 1990s and 2000s, occurred primarily as a response to bioterrorism. It was from the gradual construction of a powerful and dramatic grand narrative that biological agents could be used by terrorist groups to conduct attacks on US soil that elevated bioterrorism to a top priority on the US security agenda and intensified investments in biodefence countermeasures. Although these arguments were met with scepticism by analysts who pointed to the lack of objective evidence and questioned the extent to which terrorist groups would in fact have the necessary resources and technical skills, including laboratories, scientists, engineers, and equipment, to manipulate pathogens and develop and test biological weapons capable of being used in large-scale attacks (Wright 2004: 61; Daziel 2009: 5-6), this grand narrative was successful in constructing a sense of biological threat sufficiently potent and shared by government actors, scientists, media, and public opinion, to the point of placing bioterrorism at the top of the American security agenda. This allows us to consider that bioterrorism was constructed as an existential threat within a successful securitisation process, with broad repercussions inside and outside the USA, leading to a series of legal, institutional and operational measures to deal with the problem.

In the US context, the first legal act to incorporate and consolidate this grand narrative was the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, passed in June 2002, with the overall goal of improving ‘the ability of the United States to prevent, prepare for, and respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies’ (USA 2002a). Among its many provisions, the Bioterrorism Act devoted most of its sections on establishing measures to control biological agents and toxins affecting agriculture and livestock, to protect the food supply chain and drinking water supplies from the bioterrorist threat and other intentional acts of contamination. The Act also defined the responsible agencies and their attributions, as well as the resources allocated for scientific research to foster the implementation of measures against bioterrorism.

Concerns about bioterrorism were also reflected in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created a new federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the purpose of centralising the national strategy to protect the country against terrorism (USA 2002b). Among the numerous responsibilities assigned to the DHS were: co-operation with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the inspection and protection of domestic activities in the areas of livestock and agriculture; collaboration with the USDA in activities under the Bioterrorism Act, especially those aimed at identifying and regulating the list of biological agents and toxins, including their effects, pathogenicity and methods of contamination, availability and effectiveness of therapies and prophylaxes, or any other criteria for the protection of animal or plant health or animal or plant products; cooperation with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in biological control activities; as well as the promotion of science and technology, through research, development and evaluation programmes conducted by DHS itself or in collaboration with universities, research institutes and private companies, in several areas of homeland security interest, including food protection (USA 2002b: 2163-2165, 2170-2171, 2182-2183).

In the same year, the World Health Organisation (WHO), echoing the growing concerns expressed by member states about the possibility of malicious contamination of food for terrorist purposes, emphasised at its 55th World Health Assembly, held in May 2002, the seriousness of the situation posed by the possibility of using food as a vehicle for terrorist acts (WHO 2002: 1). One of the outcomes of that Assembly was the document entitled ‘Terrorist Threats to Food: Guidance for Establishing and Strengthening Prevention and Response Systems’. This document started from the argument that ‘threats from terrorists, criminals and other anti-social groups who target the safety of the food supply are already a reality’ and, for this reason, food terrorism had to be addressed ‘through a cooperative effort between government and industry’, since ‘the primary means for minimizing food risks lie with the food industry’ itself (WHO 2002: 1). In this document, food terrorism was defined as an act or threat of deliberate contamination of food for human consumption with chemical, biological or radionuclear agents for the purpose of causing injury or death to civilian populations and/or disrupting social, economic or political stability’ (WHO 2002: 3).

It was these developments in the social construction of bioterrorism – and food terrorism – as an existential threat and their legal, institutional, and operational consequences in the early 2000s that outlined the general frame of reference that led to the emergence of the concept of food defence and the specific practices that would be adopted in its name in the field of food protection.

The concept and practices of food defence

The concept of food defence emerged in the USA around 2003/2004 in response to the new responsibilities instituted by the Bioterrorism Act (USA 2002a), the Homeland Security Act (USA 2002b), and two presidential directives, the first focused on ‘Critical Infrastructure Identification, Prioritization, and Protection’ (USA 2003) and the second focused on ‘Defense of United States Agriculture and Food’ (USA 2004). The term food defence emerged gradually within the internal programmes and plans of three US federal agencies – the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a regulatory agency under HHS, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – as a kind of collective label to organise, conceptually and operationally, the defence of the food supply chain, from its production through distribution for consumption, against intentional acts of contamination (politically, ideologically or criminally motivated), capable of generating catastrophic and disruptive effects on public health or the economy (USDA online; DHS 2021).

The conceptual category of food defence was, therefore, strongly linked to the definition of the agriculture sector and the food industry as a critical infrastructure for national security (USA 2003), to be defended against terrorist actions, disasters, or other emergency situations (USA 2004). Indeed, the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 had already assigned to the FDA a broad set of new responsibilities that brought challenges to its sphere of operation. These challenges implied not only the need to train its investigators and scientists to face a more severe type of threat to the food sector, but also the need to develop risk management tools and procedures for examining the facilities of food manufacturers, processors and distributors with a degree of detail that would enable the detection of existing vulnerabilities and the tracing of possible attacks (Carson 2010: 405, 407).

While from a technical and operational perspective these new duties had some degree of overlap with food fraud activities, also related to protecting food from intentional adulteration (although, conceptually, the motivation for adulteration in this case is economic gain), and food safety (conceptually related to measures to preserve the health aspects of food in order to prevent unintentional contamination and poisoning), the type of threat underlying the Bioterrorism Act went beyond these concerns, as its provisions encompassed more critical and catastrophic levels of severity in food contamination and its social and economic consequences. The Bioterrorism Act, therefore, placed the FDA in front of a more challenging picture, requiring this regulatory agency to adapt itself to a degree of threat that went beyond its traditional food fraud and food safety concerns (Carson 2010: 405).

The legal framework put in place by the Bioterrorism Act and its ensuing developments in food defence programmes reproduced and reinforced, to some extent, the grand narrative that had already been feeding the HHS-led civilian biodefence programme since the 1990s, but introduced some institutional and conceptual innovations. First, while the civilian biodefence programme had been led since the 1990s by the infectious diseases branch of HHS, the food defence programme was led by the HHS-subordinated food and drug regulatory agency (FDA), which assumed a key role in the conceptual definition of food defence and the tools and procedures necessary for its implementation. Second, food defence concerns have given rise to interagency programmes, jointly conducted between the FDA, USDA, and DHS, in collaboration with a broad and expansive network of other government departments, including the defence sector (through the DoD) and the intelligence sector (through the FBI), as well as non-governmental actors related to agriculture and food production, distribution and marketing (Carson 2010: 408, 412). Third, the notion of food defence has conceptually incorporated not only concerns about malicious contamination of food by biological agents (bacteria, viruses, fungi, and their toxins), but also by chemical and radioactive agents (DHS/ 2011: 39). Thus, food defence now encompasses a broader range of possible contaminants, beyond the narrow focus on biological agents that usually occupied the conceptual core of bioterrorism and biodefence programmes.

The notion and practices of food defence have been articulated by the FDA on several fronts, including the production and dissemination of guidance to the food industry, the conduct of inspections of food facilities, the development of methods for identifying contaminants and their pathogenicity/toxicity, and strategies for identifying vulnerabilities and reducing risks in food supply chains. For these purposes, the first tool used in the FDA food defence programme was adapted from a military instrument, called Operational Risk Management (ORM). Widely employed within the DoD and developed by the Air Force Medical Service to identify, assess and manage risks that food may pose to national defence, ORM was adapted by the FDA with the following objectives: produce a list of food contaminants with hazards and effects classified in different degrees of severity, ranging from negligible to catastrophic; identify the greatest vulnerabilities and opportunities for risk reduction to the food supply; conduct ORM exercises involving the food industry; and finally, from the information acquired in these previous steps, publish a series of guidance documents aimed at adapting food industry facilities and incorporating protective measures in their crisis management plans (Carson 2010: 404-405; Severino and Almeida 2017: 47).

In 2003, due primarily to the enactment of the Homeland Security Act (USA 2002b) and the creation of the DHS as the central agency for homeland defence against terrorism, plus the government’s emphasis on critical infrastructure protection (USA 2003), including agriculture and food defence (USA 2004), the FDA, USDA and DHS were tasked with building closer working relationships and accelerating partnerships with the private sector to implement a national plan to defend food supply chains against intentional contamination, define emergency procedures for such situations, train their own technical staff and disseminate this programme to the food industry. In this context, a White House Interagency Food Working Group was established by the US government to identify and discuss common issues among the various government agencies and their food defence programmes. As a result, it was agreed that a single risk assessment model should be adopted to harmonise the efforts of all agencies involved in food defence: the so-called CARVER+Shock (Carson 2010: 406, 408).

Like ORM, the CARVER+Shock tool also came from the military sector. Defined as ‘an offensive targeting prioritization tool’, its name is an acronym used by US special operations forces to designate seven factors that affect the assessment of a target’s attractiveness to attack (Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, Recognizability + Shock). Adapted for food defence purposes, this tool is now used, according to the USDA and FDA, ‘to assess the vulnerabilities within a system or infrastructure to an attack’, allowing the food defence executive ‘to think like an attacker by identifying the most attractive targets for attack’, and based on this assessment, determine the most vulnerable points of the infrastructure and focus resources on defending its most vulnerable points (USDA/FDA 2009: 2).

Following these developments, a new partnership was formed in 2005 that specifically responded to the Homeland Security Presidential Directive 9 (HSPD-9) on ‘defending the agricultural and food system against terrorist attacks, major disasters, and other emergencies’ (USA 2004). This new partnership added to the combined efforts of the FDA, USDA and DHS the participation of the national intelligence sector, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), giving rise to the so-called ‘Strategic Partnership Program Agroterrorism (SPPA) Initiative’. The FBI’s entry into food defence efforts was intended to develop standardised reporting protocols, information sharing and joint investigations, and thereby enhance interagency collaboration in cases of suspected or evidenced acts of preparation for a terrorist attack involving the food sector (DHS/USDA/ FDA 2011: 28).

With these features, the SPPA gave food defence a more integrated characteristic, allowing greater interaction not only among the various government agencies involved, but also among the public, agriculture, food industry and marketing sectors (FDA 2005). Between 2005 and 2008, the SPPA initiative led to inspections and assessments in key food production sectors across the USA, using the CARVER+Shock assessment tool, which resulted in the identification of vulnerable points and the recommendation to implement food defence plans in the inspected sectors. As a result, workers of a wide range of industries were trained in terrorist threat-focused assessments. In addition, federal, state and local governments gained access to more consistent information about the vulnerabilities associated with the agricultural and food production sector around the country (FDA/DHS/USDA/FBI 2008).

Presidential Policy Directive PPD/8 on ‘national preparedness’, issued in 2011 by Barack Obama, renewed concerns about the food sector by including the ‘defense of agriculture and food’ among the various capabilities needed to protect the USA against acts of terrorism and disasters (USA 2011a). In the same year, the Food Safety Modernization Act was passed, which introduced a shift in efforts to protect food supply chains: instead of a reactive approach, centred on responses to emergency situations, federal regulatory agencies were called to focus on prevention. The Modernization Act further emphasised the need to strengthen collaboration among all parties involved in food protection to achieve common public health and safety goals, stipulating in its section 108 that the HHS and USDA, in coordination with the DHS, must develop and submit to Congress a ‘National Agriculture and Food Defense Strategy’ (NAFDS). According to the Modernization Act, the NAFDS must contain not only an implementation plan and a description of processes for achieving the objectives related to agriculture and food system defence, but also a research agenda coordinated by the HHS, USDA and DHS for conducting scientific research in support of agriculture and food defence objectives and activities (US 2011b).

In 2015, the HHS and USDA, in collaboration with the DHS, submitted to Congress the first version of the NAFDS (HHS/USDA 2015), which was updated in 2019 (HHS/USDA 2019), containing the objectives and guidance for enhancing the collective capacity to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from threats to the food supply, as well as the measures taken and progress made to achieve these objectives. What is noteworthy about the implementation of the 2011 Modernization Act and its subsequent developments in the NAFDS is that food defence has become increasingly detached from the dramatic and emergency political discourse that characterised its initial moment in the 2000s, strongly anchored in concerns about the bioterrorist threat. Over the past decade, food defence has become increasingly articulated according to routine activities of risk management, with a greater involvement of the food industry’s own private actors and the scientific community dedicated to food protection research. While terrorism continues to be seen as a possible vector for malicious food contamination, the food defence debate has become more technical, specialised and comprehensive, referring to any type of intentional adulteration, ‘including acts of disgruntled employees or economically motivated adulteration’, although its focus remains on preventing ‘acts intended to cause wide-scale harm’ (FDA online a).

The most recent developments within the FDA are illustrative of these changes. A look at the latest food defence standards, tools and systems (FDA online b), as well as statements by FDA executives (FDA online c), shows that practices adopted in the name of this concept have been internalised and disseminated to private companies, especially after the Modernization Act, through guides and implementation plans for preventive risk management routines, many of them developed from the lessons learnt from the experiences of the last decade and built to meet the most recent legal and regulatory provisions, going beyond the language and tools initially adapted from the military sector. More importantly, rather than focusing on specific hazards, the FDA has preferred to focus on mitigation strategies (risk reduction), indicating a shift from an initial focus on particular threats (such as bioterrorism) to a focus on food industry facilities, processes, and preventive risk reduction strategies (FDA online a). It is also important to note, that the FDA has preferred to leave it up to food companies themselves to determine how they will assess their facilities, implement mitigation strategies, and ensure that mitigation strategies are working as intended (FDA online a). This indicates a greater degree of flexibility and autonomy of the food sector in assessing their vulnerabilities and defining their food defence practices (FDA online a; online c).

The definition currently employed by the FDA indicates this broader view of food defence, now understood generically as ‘the effort to protect food from acts of intentional adulteration or tampering’ (FDA online b). This view is also shown in one of the most important food defence tools currently made available by the FDA, called the ‘Food Defense Plan Builder’ (FDPB), which gives the food industry greater flexibility in determining how their facilities should be assessed and how mitigation strategies should be implemented, monitored, corrected and verified (FDA online d; FDA 2019). The FDPB tool is a computer system that aims to provide a user-friendly system for users to create their own food defence plans, by defining their team, information about their facilities, description of their products and processes, assessment of their vulnerabilities, risk mitigation strategies, monitoring procedures, corrective actions, verification and documentation procedures, and from the compilation of all these steps, the creation of a customised food defence plan suited to the particular characteristics of each user (FDA 2019).

In summary, over the last decade, food defence practices have been disseminated in a more routine and bureaucratic way, through technical standards, preventive risk reduction measures and exchanges between professionals and experts in the field of food protection, including the more active and autonomous involvement of the business sector. Due to this growing routinisation and autonomy in the implementation of food defence measures, the expansion of the debate beyond the USA, including recent initiatives to apply this concept in peripheral countries of the Global South, including Brazil, has focused mainly on the conceptual delimitation, technological, institutional, regulatory and operational aspects, as well as on certification standards to meet the necessary requirements for the competitive insertion of the national food sector into the global market. It is this more technical, specialised, and operational approach that has been the predominant focus of government agencies, the food industry and the academic debate in other regions of the world, as observed, for example, in studies introducing the food defence concept and practices in the European Union (Bogadi, Banovic and Babic 2016), Portugal (Severino 2016; Severino and Almeida 2017), Croatia (Jurica, Vrdoljak and Karačonji 2019), as well as in some parts of the Global South, such as Asian countries (Dalziel 2009) and Brazil (Andrade, Oliveira and Freitas 2021).

Logics and characteristics of the securitisation of the food supply

The empirical panorama described in the previous sections shows that it is within the framework of bioterrorism that the emergence of food defence should be understood. Within the securitised narrative on bioterrorism, food is now seen as a vehicle that can be used in terrorist attacks. The possibility that intentional, ideologically motivated contamination of the food supply could result in large-scale damage, with impacts for US national security, raised the alarm on the need for food defence. This made the food sector in the USA a critical infrastructure to be protected against malicious acts, leading to the justification of a sequence of laws, institutional arrangements and protective countermeasures, aimed at defending the food sector against hostile acts by terrorist groups.

With regard to this logic of threats and vulnerabilities, it is important to highlight that much more than individual life, it is the economy, the food industry and the social order of the state that are central objects of reference of the securitising narrative associated with the debate on food defence. In fact, individual life is at the core of another narrative in the field of food protection, associated with the notion of food security, which since the 1970s has articulated the idea that minimum standards of human development are undermined due to lack of access to individual and basic subsistence needs. In other words, food security narratives are traditionally defined by a strong humanitarian concern, referring to the right of all people, at all times and places, to have physical, social, and economic access to nutritious food, in sufficient quantity and quality, capable of satisfying needs and preferences for an active and healthy life (Mechlem 2004; Severino and Almeida 2017: 20; Moerman 2018: 150).

Therefore, the explicit association of the word ‘security’ with the food sector, as it appears in the food security agenda, directs the field of food protection towards concerns about human security. From this perspective, the aim of food security is to overcome the effects of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, disease and environmental degradation on people’s lives and health. From the Copenhagen School’s point of view, such narratives that bring the referent of security to the individual level and to a set of human security’s emancipatory concerns are unlikely to lead to successful securitisation, since they lack the existential quality that is proper to the exceptional and emergency dimensions of the security agenda (Wæver 2003: 30-31; Buzan and Wæver 2009: 254; Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 104). Thus, when referring to the food security agenda, the Copenhagen School’s theorists consider that the meaning of security incorporated into this debate is anchored in a humanitarian commitment, and for this reason its concerns are more likely to remain within the normal political, economic, societal, or environmental agendas, without acquiring the priority and existential quality necessary to integrate the positions of the security agenda (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 104).

Thus, if the food security agenda incorporates a humanitarian and emancipatory meaning of security, without establishing the existential logic of a securitisation process, it can be said that it is the evocation of the label ‘defence’ in the field of food protection, from the 2000s onwards by political authorities and executives of US government agencies such as the HHS, FDA, USDA, DHS, FBI and DoD, that articulate the food sector according to the grammar of securitisation. The notion of food defence was born in association with the idea that food can be used as a weapon, through intentional contamination by politically or ideologically motivated groups, and thereby cause disruptions in the social, political and economic order. It is within this logic of threats and vulnerabilities that the defence of the agriculture and food system was justified as a necessary response to block the development of potential biological, chemical and radiological contamination that could endanger the social, political and economic stability of nations.

From this perspective, the notion of food defence was militarised from the outset, bringing to the field of food protection a logic derived from national defence and a vocabulary that, although adjusted to private activities and articulated from an aspiration to protect civilian populations, reproduced military language games. The adaptation of military tools such as ORM and CARVER+Shock, and the projection of military concepts onto food defence techniques and procedures, are clear symptoms of a process that some authors call ‘militarisation’ – that is, the application of military values, qualities and practices to other sectors of society (Basham 2016) – which found space to penetrate the field of food protection as a result of the securitisation of food supply initiated in the 2000s.

In addition to these considerations, other aspects should be noted to gain a deeper understanding of the process of securitisation of food supply. The first crucial aspect is that the mere association of the notion of food defence with concerns about terrorism has produced a securitising effect in the field of food protection. As Buzan and Wæver (2009) argue, there are securitisations that take place at the highest levels of international politics – the so-called macro-securitisations – that have the capacity to encompass and hierarchize other processes on a smaller scale, determining their outcome. While the Cold War typically took on these characteristics, producing a securitising effect on all issues associated with it, the ‘global war on terror’, as Buzan and Wæver (2009: 274-276) argue, was constructed by the USA as the prime candidate for post-Cold War macro-securitisation.

Although the war on terror subsequently lost this macro dimension, due to the growing contestation and loss of national and international legitimacy regarding the exceptional measures adopted in its name, the fact is that concerns about the defence of food against malicious acts of terrorism in the first half of the 2000s, at the very moment when the USA was trying to construct terrorism as a macro-securitisation, allowed that the connexion of the notion of food defence with terrorism had contributed to reinforce the social acceptance of the smaller-scale securitisation move that was taking place in the field of food protection.

Besides this exceptionalist logic, there is another aspect that, although not fitting into the semantic model of securitisation proposed by the Copenhagen School, significantly impacts the securitisation process of the food sector. As can be seen from the elements highlighted in the previous sections, food defence practices became increasingly developed within a technical and specialised framework. In this context, the sharing of risk assessment and management procedures among the various agencies involved in food defence, as well as the emphasis on surveillance, physical protection of food facilities, and intelligence exchange indicate that food defence measures have taken place, especially over the last decade, through routine interactions and exchange of everyday solutions to deal with the practical problems faced by professionals and specialists in (in)security, detached from the exceptionalist logic of discourses and directives of political elites involved at the highest level of policy formulation, as observed in the 2000s.

As examined in the previous section, these more bureaucratic and routine dynamics could be observed, for example, in the context of the so-called ‘Strategic Partnership Program Agroterrorism Initiative’ (SPPA), when not only the efforts of the FDA, USDA and DHS, but also the FBI began to develop standard protocols and routine interagency investigation procedures focused on identifying vulnerable points in food sector facilities, resulting in the proposal of physical barriers, surveillance measures, employee training and the development of food defence plans and routines in the agricultural sector and food industries. Since the so-called Food Safety Modernisation Act of 2011, with the shift in focus to prevention (instead of the approach previously centred on reactive responses to emergency situations), inter-agency collaboration, acting especially in the role of regulation and certification, and the involvement of the food sector itself in preventive food defence measures have been intensified. The very tool that has come to be prioritised in the last decade in the implementation of food defence measures, as can be seen for example in the case of the ‘Food Defence Plan Builder’ (FDPB), has come to involve the food industry itself more actively in the development and implementation of risk reduction strategies, giving the food sector greater autonomy in assessing its vulnerabilities and in defining its food defence techniques and practices.

A look at these more pragmatic aspects suggests that the securitisation of the food sector also results from physical arrangements, checkpoints in production processes, surveillance mechanisms through cameras or monitoring of activities by employees themselves, computer systems, information exchange, dissemination of standard certification procedures, as well as other measures that reflect a set of non-discursive practices aimed at reducing risks. This set of measures has given food defence an increasingly procedural and bureaucratic character that seems detached from the dramatic discourse of sovereign elites speaking from a position of power. It is important to note that, even within this routine logic, focused on prevention and risk reduction, the food sector continues to reproduce and reinforce, through specialized exchange between regulatory agencies, the food industry and the production of academic research, the idea that food must be defended against intentional, ideologically motivated malicious acts capable of producing disruptions in the social order.

These developments show, therefore, that food supply has been constructed as a security problem not only through the discursive and emergency logic that associated the notion of food defence with bioterrorism, but also through technical guidelines, standard procedures, certification rules, physical arrangements, surveillance, and other everyday risk management procedures. These later aspects have become equally relevant to understand how the food sector has been securitised. These developments also show that the academic community and research institutions, as well as the food industry, which generally operate outside discursive politics and positions of decision-making and political power, have impacted the securitisation of the food supply through the production and reproduction of technical knowledge and practices of management used by the food industry in reaction to food defence certification guidelines and standards.

The aspects observed in this article suggest, therefore, a more integrated and non-polarised picture of securitisation. It was the dramatic and catastrophic discourse on the bioterrorist threat, constructed at the strategic level of US policy formulation and sustained by the acceptance of the scientific community, media, food industry and public opinion, that justified and legitimised the substantive measures that came to be practiced in the name of food defence. It is also important to note that these substantive and procedural practices, the lessons learnt in the implementation of measures, the interactions of experts from different sectors, the technical and scientific production of knowledge, the involvement of the food industry, and the production of systems and tools of risk management also impacted policies adopted at the higher levels of decision-making, creating a relationship of mutual constitution between discursive and non-discursive practices, between different levels and logics of action.

When considering this whole picture, it is also important to note that the semantic association of the label ‘defence’ to the term ‘food’ should not be understood as a trivial terminological choice, but rather as a central element of the process of food supply securitisation. Even if the concept and practices of food defence have been increasingly articulated through routine risk management procedures, this does not mean that food defence has detached itself from the securitised logic that marked the emergence of this debate. In this respect, it is noteworthy, as the Copenhagen School suggests when referring to the label ‘defence’, that ‘constant drama need not always be present’ in securitisation processes (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 27), because when one refers to the word ‘defence’, associating it with a particular topic, one is implicitly in the emergency terrain of security. This means, in other words, that the application of the label ‘defence’ to the food sector in itself reflects a securitising move: by declaring that a given topic is a defence issue, all the political aspects associated with that term (national security, war, priority, emergency, survival, preparedness) become linked to that topic. In this case, the need to maintain drama in establishing securitisation tends to diminish, because it is implicitly assumed that when talking about defence, we are by definition in the security terrain (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998: 28).

Thus, the shift from the dramatic rhetoric that accompanied the emergence of the concept of food defence in the first half of the 2000s to an increasingly precautionary logic of risk management that one observes today in food defence guidance, procedures and institutions should not be interpreted as a reversal of the construction of the food sector as a security problem – or, using the Copenhagen School’s vocabulary, as if a process of desecuritisation has occurred. What is noteworthy within this shift is that food specialists themselves (food regulatory agencies’ experts; producers, processors, shippers, retailers, and food preparers; nutritionists and health professionals; scholars and researchers; etc.) have become productive within the securitising dynamics that keep food supply, under the conceptual label of food defence, permanently mobilised around security objectives.

Conclusion

This article has shown that food defence narratives and practices introduced in the USA and increasingly disseminated in other parts of the world reflect a successful process of securitisation of food supply. Two important points are worth highlighting about this process. The first is that there are broader securitising logics that preceded and influenced the emergence of food defence concept and practices within the food protection field. These logics are shown not only through the discursive linkage of the notion of food defence and terrorism (in a moment when terrorism emerged as a higher and more comprehensive securitisation with macro-securitisation characteristics in late 1990s and early 2000s), but also through the semantic association of the food sector with the label ‘defence’. These securitising dynamics brought to the food protection field a militarised logic associated with the traditional discourses of national security, with its own vocabulary, tools and ways of coping with existential threats. In the US context, this process was articulated discursively by several securitising actors, especially during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the executives of the main agencies involved with health and food (HHS, USDA), homeland security (DHS), defence (DoD) and intelligence (FBI), and aimed at the food sector, the general population and the academic community as audiences that accepted the construction of the food sector as an emergency and priority issue within the security agenda. At the global level, the main securitising actor was the World Health Organisation, which constructed in the early 2000s a discourse addressed to government authorities and the food industry in which food terrorism was articulated as a threat to populations and the social, economic and political stability of states. The notion of food defence emerged closely linked to these discursive constructions.

The second point is that this securitisation process also occurs at the micro level of routine practices, surveillance, inspections, spatial arrangements, information exchange, training, and risk management procedures in the food sector. Mainly over the last decade, the FDA, USDA, DHS and FBI, together with the food industry itself and the academic field have become productive in the development of standard protocols and routine procedures of food security. Taken separately and individually, these quasi-automatic preventive routines may appear to be mere standard bureaucratic and technical procedures, but when considered together and systematically, they play an important role in the process that keeps the food sector securitised.

From this picture, we draw two important conclusions. The first, specifically related to the debate on food defence, is that this concept is not limited to its technical and operational aspects but is anchored in a strong political and security dimension. Unless this dimension is understood, it is not possible to deeply understand the role that this concept plays in the broad field of food protection. In a context of increasing export of this concept to other parts of the world, including to countries in the so-called Global South, it is important that the debate on food defence does not lose sight of the fact that, behind its technical and operational aspects, there is a broad securitization process closely connected, from its origins, with US security and defence concerns. Although the implications of this finding for peripheral countries in the Global South were not the focus of this article, we think that a more critical perspective is necessary in the academic debate when considering the applicability of the food defence concept outside its original political conditions and context.

The second conclusion, specifically related to the debate on securitization theory, is that a more comprehensive and integrated approach to securitisation – one that overrides dichotomous views between linguistic and non-linguistic elements, between exceptionalism and routine, or between threat and risk – provides a more adequate framework for analysing the social construction of security, especially when this process involves non-conventional military issues, as is the case with the topic analysed in this article. We also note that a closer look at the consequences of this process in terms of behavioural and policy change (including the production of norms, laws, regulations, institutional changes, as well as actions, practices and behaviours of those affected by the securitisation move) is an important step to empirically assess whether the securitisation has been successful. These aspects reinforce the arguments highlighted in the first section, placing this study in line with perspectives that advocate the need to expand and revise the Copenhagen School’s original premises of securitisation theory.

List of acronyms

CARVER+Shock – Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, Recognizability + Shock

DHS – US Department of Homeland Security

DoD – US Department of Defense

FBI – US Federal Bureau of Investigation

FDA – Food and Drug Administration

FDPB – Food Defense Plan Builder

HHS – US Department of Health and Human Services

NAFDS – National Agriculture and Food Defense Strategy

NBCR – Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Radiological

ORM – Operational Risk Management

SPPA – Strategic Partnership Program Agroterrorism

UN – United Nations

USDA – US Department of Agriculture

WHO – World Health Organisation

Notes

• 1
  The Copenhagen School identifies five sectors where securitisation processes can occur: in addition to the military sector, traditionally associated with the security agenda, securitisation also takes place in the political, economic, societal, and environmental sectors (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998).

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the financial support provided by the Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation (FAPERJ - E-26.201.302/2022) and to the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq - 311108/2021-0). The authors are very grateful for the comments of two anonymous reviewers, who greatly contributed to the improvement of the manuscript.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  19 May 2025
• Date of issue
  Jan/Abr 2025

History

• Received
  22 July 2022
• Accepted
  2 Feb 2024