Micro Terror

n an average, quarantine officials regularly find that 5 to 10 per cent of the agricultural imports contain pests, including those alien to India. "This even includes products from certain countries such as the US that are certified to be free from pests. Nobody is serious about what they export and many countries often want to dump infected goods on us at cheap prices," says Khetarpal, who is also the head of plant quarantine at the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources. In many cases, pests have been, and are still being, released untraced into the environment.

There are many documented instances of how alien pests have come in to cause great damage to plants and animals in India. The best example is Parthenium, widely referred to as Congress Grass, that was introduced in the late 1950s through wheat imports from the US. The grass has gone on to become a serious threat to the ecosystem. Not only does it occupy vast tracts of otherwise arable land, it also has emerged as a grave allergen.

Similarly, it is also known that a majority of the seed-borne viruses in pulses are foreign in origin and came in through import consignments. Today they severely affect India's yield of pulses. Other recent cases include the Coffee Berry Borer that came in from Sri Lanka into the Nilgiri plantations in 1990, the Cotton Leaf Curl Virus that came in from Pakistan in the late 1990s and the Tomato Leaf Curl Virus which became rampant in Kolar, Karnataka.

In the case of animals, diseases like bovine viral diarrhoea, malignant catarrh fever and avian flu have been diagnosed in recent years in imported livestock and poultry. Cautions Satish Chandra, a former deputy national security advisor, "If a gene shift were to occur resulting in avian flu attaining the ability to transmit itself from human to human, this country is going to be hit severely because we still do not have the requisite surveillance mechanism for early detection and infrastructure to handle such an outbreak."

The term bio-terrorism is associated with outbreaks of human diseases caused due to an intentional release of dreaded diseases such as anthrax. It also includes agro-terrorism that refers to the deliberate introduction of a plant or animal disease aimed at crippling a country's food security. There has been no proven case of agro-terrorism in the country so far but security and agricultural experts fear that India, given its agrarian base and varied ecosystems, is vulnerable to this threat. This is because related security measures are at best low. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between a natural outbreak and a deliberately caused attack.

"While agricultural terrorism is not a threat today, it may be a threat of tomorrow. The nature of terrorism evolves constantly. We therefore have to be prepared for any eventuality," says Ajey Lele, a research fellow at the Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Says Animesh Roul of Institute for the Study of Peace and Conflict, "India's growing billion dollar fast-food industry makes it a lucrative target for terrorists."

That a cohesive quarantine policy has been long overdue to protect the country from alien pests, more so in this age of increased globalisation and climatic changes, is indisputable. As Khetarpal says, "What needs to be ensured is that liberalisation of trade does not necessarily lead to globalisation of pests." That too, quickly.