Abstract— The food supply chain could became a dangerous weapon in the hands of enemies, for this reason the strategies developed to fight food adulteration (food safety) should be complemented with specific actions devoted to improve food “security” in the sense of food defence. This paper illustrate the methodological approach used in the EU project SecuFood to analyze threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures existing in major European countries about what concerns deliberate attacks and manipulations of food. I. INTRODUCTION HE 11 th of September 2001 is remembered as the date that showed as daily used infrastructures can become a weapon of mass destruction if they falls in the hands of terrorists or criminals. Those events have seriously posed a doubt about the security of daily systems and infrastructures. The air transport is surely perceived as one of the most dangerous and attachable infrastructure. However, this perception does not find on solid bases because the air transport has a reduced number of vulnerable points, i.e. the airports, and has a high level of security measures currently applied worldwide. Other civil infrastructures of daily use are less perceived as dangerous, but are, actually, more vulnerable, and do not show a so capillary security control because they are used or managed by a large number of subjects, in different sectors. Sectors in which these problems are particularly felt are those of health and food [17]. In fact, immediately after the 9/11 the World Health Organisation (WHO) stressed the risks due to Food Terrorism, defined as “an act or threat of deliberate contamination of food for human consumption with biological, chemical and physical agents or radionuclear materials for the purpose of causing injury or death to civilian populations and/or disrupting social, economic or political stability” [1]. Thee WHO report on “Terrorist threats to food: guidance for establishing and strengthening prevention and response systems” [1], highlights the importance of the primary responsibility for managing emerging international threats to Manuscript received April 7, 2009. This work was supported partially by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Justice, Freedom and Security within the Specific Programme on “Prevention, Preparedness and Consequence Management of Terrorism and other Security-related risks” under Grant JLS/2008/CIPS/022 SecuFood – Security of European Food Supply Chain. R. Setola and M. De Maggio are within the Complex System & Security Lab of the University Campus Bio-Medico, via Alvaro del Portillo 21, 00128 Roma, ITALY (corresponding author to provide phone: +39-06-22- 541-9603 fax: +39-06-22-541-9609; e-mail: r.setola@unicampus.it). public health. This guide is addressed to policy makers, but also to food industry and consumers, and it encourages the adoption of further regulation in the food safety systems, to take in consideration the food terrorist threat. This because an action by terrorists aiming to affect the food supply chain can lead death and disease, with a high and widespread diffusion among the population. This is only one of the initiatives promoted by the WHO for preventing threats to food, whose necessity was highlighted also by the resolution adopted during the 55th World Health Assembly (WHA 55.16) [2], which expressed concerns about civil threats by deliberate actions through biological, chemical or radio nuclear means. WHA 55.16 stressed specifically that a possible and effective way to disseminate these agents and materials is the food. In this contest, the WHO’s International Health Regulation [3] states that in the case of incidents involving deliberate contamination of food, the national public authorities have the responsibility to inform the WHO International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN). The theme of the protection of the food supply chain, intended as food defence, has a great attention in the USA [6] being it recognised as one of the 17 national critical sectors [13], [14], and a specific work plan [5] has been recently released. In spite of this, USA registered from 2006 to 2008 many cases of salmonella or E. coli outbreaks, caused by different food contaminations. These outbreaks involved several small or large portions of the USA and caused a certain number of victims, some of which required hospitalisation, a few of which was dead. In most cases the Food and Drug Association and the local authorities were unable to determine the cause of the outbreaks [8]. The incidents occurred in the USA demonstrate as the public health, in relation to the food supply chain, is exposed to significant risks, although the efforts to guarantee the security of the food infrastructure. Obviously, these risks are applicable to all the countries and the geographical areas, as stressed for example by the specification carried on in UK by the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) [12] and by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) Counter Terrorism Task Force (CTTF) [16]. In particular, in Europe the attention to the theme of the food supply chain protection has been very low in the last years; the problem has been raised by the EC Green Paper on Bio-Preparedness [18], which aim is to address efforts for reducing biological risks and enhance preparedness and response to these risks, in particular regarding the food Security of the Food Supply Chain Roberto Setola, Senior Member, IEEE, and Maria Carla De Maggio T 7061 31st Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, September 2-6, 2009 978-1-4244-3296-7/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE