Toward biodefence: a framework for the mitigation of malicious threats to livestock production enterprises in Australia

Abstract

Biosecurity underpins the Australian agricultural sector, estimated to be worth $51 billion in exports and trade, $50 billion in tourism, $5.7 trillion in environmental assets, and more than 1.6 million jobs. Given the value to the Australian economy and the potential consequences of a deliberately introduced biological agent, measures to prevent malicious biosecurity threats are critical for national security. Using the framework of Situational Crime Prevention (SCP), the study examined recommended biosecurity practices for cattle production enterprises in Australia and explored the extent to which the Australian biosecurity framework is underpinned by preventative security. The study found the existing biosecurity framework has limited theoretical security underpinning and is constituted by practices primarily aimed at preventing naturally occurring and accidental threats, rather than an active preventative security approach at the farming level to mitigate threats of a malicious or deliberate nature. These findings identify a deficit in Australia’s national security approach to biosecurity in cattle production enterprises, establishing a need for biosecurity recommendations at an industry and primary production level to embed security theory and principles to account for malicious actors in alignment with international biodefence strategy. Subsequently, the study demonstrated how security theory can be applied to biosecurity and the agricultural sector more broadly and developed an SCP framework toward biodefence of agriculture, converging biosecurity and security as a bilateral approach to mitigating naturally occurring, accidental, and deliberate biosecurity threats.