Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Hey! I knew about the fleas thing!

THE TERRORISTS’ LETTER arrived at the office of the mayor of Los Angeles on Nov. 30, 1989. A group calling itself The Breeders claimed to have secretly imported, bred, and released the Mediterranean fruit fly in Los Angeles and Orange counties. And they threatened to expand the attack into the San Joaquin Valley, a major center of California agriculture.

The “Medfly” had appeared that August in survey traps not far from Dodger Stadium, and officials were spraying in an effort to get rid of it. The pest attacks 300 different fruits, vegetables, and nuts, reducing plant tissue to a maggoty pulp that rots and falls to the ground. An established infestation would bring widespread destruction and mean that produce could no longer be shipped out of state, potentially costing 132,000 jobs and $13.4 billion in lost revenues.

Eventually the infestation ended, after heavy spraying. There is still debate about whether ecoterrorists stoked the Medfly infestation, but the panic the episode engendered suggests that The Breeders were flirting with a powerful weapon.

One of the cheapest and most destructive weapons available to terrorists today is also one of the most widely ignored: insects. These biological warfare agents are easy to sneak across borders, reproduce quickly, spread disease, and devastate crops in an indefatigable march. Our stores of grain could be ravaged by the khapra beetle, cotton and soybean fields decimated by the Egyptian cottonworm, citrus and cotton crops stripped by the false codling moth, and vegetable fields pummeled by the cabbage moth. The costs could easily escalate into the billions of dollars, and the resulting disruption of our food supply - and our sense of well-being - could be devastating. Yet the government focuses on shoe bombs and anthrax while virtually ignoring insect insurgents.

Indeed, a great strategic lesson of 9/11 has been overlooked. Terrorists need only a little ingenuity, not sophisticated weapons, to cause enormous damage. Armed only with box cutters, terrorists hijacked planes and brought down the towers of the World Trade Center. Insects are the box cutters of biological warfare - cheap, simple, and wickedly effective.

“I can write for you on a postcard a series of different ways to paralyze the agriculture industry of the United States, where we have no possibility of being able to respond,” said Geoff Letchworth, the former director of the US Department of Agriculture’s Arthropod-Borne Animal Diseases Research Laboratory.

Full BG article by Jeffrey A. Lockwood here.