Biological Warfare Against Crops : A Scientific American article

Rating:
Summary: Halfway there...
Review: Anthrax and smallpox get all the public's attention when it comes to biological weapons, but many biologists have warned that the greater threat is against agriculture. Attacks on livestock and crops could have much more profound impacts on a society than could many anti-personnel agents. In this slim volume, Simon Whitby sets out to demonstrate this thesis.

The book has the expected components: a brief outline of plant
pathology, a review of the effects of disease on crop yield and its effects across the world. It also uses declassified US documents to assemble a history of US anticrop warfare research and a large chapter on the planning of a possible attack on China's rice crop.

The overall view is historical and the chapters on the history of the US program are the most interesting and illuminate many interesting points. However, Whitby is a policy wonk and he keeps on charging off the track into thickets of policy that are are not relevant to his thesis. There is a large section on how Vannevar Bush manoeuvered himself into a dominant position in the wartime scientific research establishment. Whether Vannevar Bush or Kate Bush was in charge of scientific research at the time is irrelevant. The person having the greatest effect on vulnerability to anti-crop biological warfare was already in Washington and doesn't get mentioned in the book at all. Other excursions into the policy debate are more interesting, such as
Cuba's efforts to get two thrips included in the list of anticrop agents which highlights the challenges and the highly political nature of the topic. It is a highly political topic, but I do not see policy issues as relevant to an analysis of the nature and effects of anti-crop warfare.

As a policy wonk Whitby does not appear at all comfortable with the science. He spends many pages in lengthy quotes to define terms that he could have covered in a few lines and comes up with strained repetitive writing. Later in the book he pleads shortage of space. He also makes a number of technical errors (Phytophthora was taken out of the fungi half a decade ago; witches' broom isn't caused by a fungus.) Scientific
names are often inaccurate or outdated and the partially translated table of insect pests that Nazi Germany investigated is largely useless. However, there is a good discussion of major crops and their pathogens.

Does he prove his point? Not entirely. Apart from the policy debates, the book centers on declassified, and also very old, research from the United States. The documents show that anti-crop warfare was taken seriously and that target crops had been identified and the technical, logistic, and tactical problems were addressed and that ways to cause great damage were considered. Things have changed. Some of the agents not used in the 1950's may be useful now because of advances in technologies such as microencapsulation and culture methods. New agents have appeared, we have a much greater understanding of the relationship between crops and their pathogens and we have better defenses. The landscape of 2003 is very different from that of 1953, 1963, and even 1993.

More importantly, the book does not look at changes in agriculture and in crop plants in the past 50 years. The person not mentioned by Whitby who may have greatly increased crop plant vulnerability, but who also did so much good for US agriculture was Vice-President Henry Wallace. Wallace was a plant breeder. He greatly increased the yield and improved the agronomic performance of corn (maize) by selective breeding. He did this by bringing corn under control. He established a group of highly inbred lines that could be crossed and recrossed and selected and screened for the sort of performance farmers wanted. The consequence of this was that he also narrowed the genetic variability available to the plant breeder. All the plants in any field of cereals are genetically almost identical, they share the same strengths and the same weaknesses. A pathogen that attacks any one plant of a variety will attack them all. The ability to introduce weaknesses into plants is demonstrated by the accidental introduction of susceptibility to Southern leaf blight by corn breeders in the 1980's. Brief case studies of major crop failures caused by disease would have been helpful.

This book is not without merit. It brings to light a great deal of interesting information and heads largely in the right direction. I have to think that it could have been greatly improved if Whitby had spent a bit less time in the archives, and had left his office at the University of Bradford to spend a few hours talking to farmers in the Vale of York.

Rating:
Summary: recommended reading by nervegas.com
Review: This is an excellent historical review of anticrop BW efforts. The author starts with Iraq and UNSCOM, then quickly moves into describing the history of modern anticrop warfare from pre-WWII to the end of the US's BW program.

It covers the early efforts by France and Germany, then US and British efforts. Also described are US weapon systems, and target analysis.

This is a must have book in regards to studing anticrop BW, and understanding its history.