Innovating to Manage an Never Occurred Risk: Plant Pathologists and Their Assessment of Agro-Terrorist Threats

Globalization implies increased human circulation and exchanges of plants, seeds, and biological material, and hence pathogens. Markets, countries but also science have to face new challenges regarding biosecurity to ensure food quantity and quality. 9/11 gave rise to new fears, in our case, agro-terrorism, meaning the deliberate introduction of plant pathogens in crops or the food chain to starve populations or at least spread panic among them. This risk has never become reality in history. Some American plant pathologists obtained significant funding to assess that risk and prepare a response to it, though. Not to be outdone, EU launched two successive programs to build up “expertise”, and develop “awareness” and “preparedness” and to assess possible economic outcomes of such an attack. But how can a risk be assessed without prior relevant data? Does this “awareness” towards a potential future threat change existing plant health specialists’ knowledge, missions and networks? Plant pathology is a regulatory science. It committed to face a new puzzle, i.e. to deal with human intentionality, while it commonly regulates accidental or natural introduction of pathogens. We studied plant epidemiology networks and knowledge infrastructures in phyto-pathology and show this new regulatory agenda involves obliged plant pathologists to innovate in terms of risk assessment methods. But do those innovations do percolate in daily professional practices?

The research is threefold. First, it is based on an international comparison between France, Italy and Great Britain. It is based on interviews with the main actors (scientific, governmental etc.) involved in biosecurity issues at the national level. The second part of the study uses scientometric methods in order to explore how scientific communities dealing with biosecurity are structured. A complex network analysis of the scientific literature on the subject reveals how concepts associated with biosecurity agroterrorism, bioterrorism, but also the authors and institutions involved in the production of those concepts, analysis and recommendations, contribute to structure this field of research. Finally, we studied one of the European programs (FP7) mentioned above. We carried out interviews tracing back its history and that of the involvement of its members. Moreover, our participation to several meetings allowed us to observe how plant pathologists transformed literary scenarios of attack into Bayesian models of risk analysis resting on already existing expertise on plant pathogens. Our study aims at showing how uncertainty can constitute an opportunity for some professions, but also how its apprehension modifies surveillance networks, scientific production and, finally, how coping with uncertainty requires the use of narratives that have to be desiccated and transformed into risk assessment models to become operational.