The Need for International Perspectives to Solve Global Biosecurity Challenges

Abstract

Global biosecurity presents international challenges because the majority of instances of novel organism introductions are due to international movements of goods, food and people and the likelihood of introduced agents crossing political boundaries. The inherent vulnerability of environments to introductions of alien, or non-indigenous, biological agents is due to the greater ecological vulnerability to these exotic entrants in the receiving environment. Agencies and individuals responsible for approving intentional introductions of beneficial organisms recognize this relationship and consider potential impacts in risk assessments prior to release of the organisms. However, some of those responsible for detection and control of novel pathogens and pests, introduced either inadvertently or intentionally, lack extensive training in ecology, environmental biology, and pathology, and may therefore underestimate the risk from such events. The latter is a key factor in the case of food safety. Europe is particularly vulnerable to cross-border movement of introduced agents, and one response to this has been the recent revision of plant health regimes throughout the European Union. Other responses include project-based initiatives, such as PLANTFOODSEC.

Much of the existing framework for biosecurity has evolved over decades due to the need for States to protect the public from unsafe food, and from economic and sociocultural losses to biodiversity and agricultural resources. While malicious intentional releases are rare compared to conventional trade related unintentional introductions of agents, the security paradigm (the possibility of intentional introductions) should be added to more traditional biosecurity approaches that focus on inadvertent and accidental incursions. While there is a need to distinguish the unusual from the ordinary, in both source and receiving areas, security-related risks should be set within that context, in terms of risk assessment (for appropriate scaling) and for management of factors common to conventional plant health risks. This chapter considers the existing international risk frameworks and how to adapt them to include the security paradigm by moving from the traditional concepts (agent-pathway-receptor systems) to also consider motivation.. Motivation for harm may arise from experiences at home or abroad, and the pathway for access, transport and delivery of harmful agents would link a foreign source to the receptor environment in a global system. The adapted processes provide a general framework for analysing malicious biosecurity risks in a consistent and proportionate manner. For food safety in particular, novel agents introduced to the food supply maliciously may not be anticipated or identified initially through the traditional risk assessment. For this and other cases, the formation of networks of experience and technical excellence, such as that accomplished by PLANTFOODSEC, will help to fill the gaps and address the weaknesses of individual national programs. A call is made to create a mechanism and assign a coordination role for a sustainable international cooperation in addressing the full spectrum of global biosecurity concerns.