Biological Weapons for Waging Economic Warfare
Lt Col Robert P. Kadlec, USAF
The final decade of the twentieth century has positioned the world at the threshold of tremendous opportunity. The collapse of the Soviet Union has dissolved the bipolar world and created the opening to forge a new international security environment. The preeminence of politico-military competition is slowly giving way to politico-economic competition. As Shintaro Ishihara predicts, “The twenty-first century will be a century of economic warfare.”
While military power remains important, its context and type are changing. The focus of many developing nations is to seek weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—to meet regional security concerns. The parallel emergence of economic competition and its likely accompanying conflicts with the proliferation of WMD raises the possibility of a new form of warfare. This includes the development and use of biological warfare (BW) against economic targets.
Using BW to attack livestock, crops, or ecosystems offers an adversary the means to wage a potentially subtle yet devastating form of warfare, one which would impact the political, social, and economic sectors of a society and potentially of national survival itself.
Agriculture
For both developed and developing nations, nonfuel commodities present an important source of national security and prosperity. In the United States alone, the agricultural sector is an $800 billion industry. Besides providing for the nourishment of the US population and a significant portion of the world, agriculture generated approximately $67 billion in export revenues in 1991. This revenue represents approximately 15 percent of the total US exports for that particular year. Agricultural exports have been an important source for redressing the US trade deficit. Moreover, agriculture is now one of but a handful of sectors that generates a trade surplus for the US. In 1992 it created an estimated $18-billion surplus.
Lesser developed and developing nations and other nations whose economies are in transition have significant agricultural sectors that provide important contributions of food and revenue to their economies. This observation is especially true of nonoil producing nations. Yet, even with productive agricultural systems, most if not all nations in the world are food importers.
Trends in agricultural systems, particularly food production, indicate that fewer numbers of people and hectares are involved in agricultural production. In developed market economies, the percentage of the economically active population in agriculture declined by 31.2 percent from 1980 to 1992. A similar, yet not as dramatic, decline was noted in developing countries, where the numbers of people involved in agriculture declined by 11.3 percent during the same period. Despite that decline, the overall agricultural productivity in both the developed and developing worlds increased by 45.3 percent and 25.2 percent respectively.
This increase in productivity has resulted from the spread of modern farming technology, high-yield crop varieties, and potent fertilizers and pesticides. The goal of many developing and developed nations is to become self-sufficient in food and other agricultural products.

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