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In which an agricultural scientist goes from making new squash varieties to trying to improve global food security.
On December 12, 2017, the US Congress reauthorized the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2018. Every year, this massive bill authorizes spending for the Department of Defense. But this time, it contained a Section 1075, on page 929, really no more than a paragraph, requiring the secretary of defense to submit to Congress a "Report on the Global Food System and Vulnerabilities Relevant to Department of Defense Missions."
Whenever you eat lunch, or anything else, you partake not only in the US food system-defined as all infrastructure, material, transactions, and decisions that affect the production, delivery, and consumption of food by every person in the nation every day-but also in something much larger called the "global food system." We don't have a precise meaning for this term, or even a working representation of how todays global food system works. But we do know it is a complex, intertwined, and constantly changing system, operating at a scale and complexity way outside every historical precedent.
The government already has plenty of data on food and agriculture, which it classifies as one of the "critical infrastructure sectors" whose "assets, systems and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety or any combination thereof." But in contrast with some other essential sectors, agriculture and food manufacturing, distribution and retail is almost entirely in private hands, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the US economy. That said, the government has considerable influence on this sector through various policies that regulate food safety and incentivize the production of certain commodities. Yet the question of how risks in this big, complex global food system could threaten the security of the United States-and ways the nation might protect itself-remains wide open.
Once this question was inserted as Section 1075 in the NDAA, though, it became the DOD's job to answer it.
The path to Section 1075 had actually started a decade earlier, when I had begun to wonder about the stability and security of our vision for twenty-first century...