A recent series of NY Times articles has tracked novel risks emerging from the global food and drug supply chain. China, as has been mentioned before, seems to be the key source of threat. The major issue is that given the complexities of the supply chain (and the practice of erasing the original suppliers in order to protect the middleman) there is no way of tracking where ingredients come from – such as glycerin in toothpaste – and so if it turns out that there are dangerous counterfeit supplies, it is impossible to locate and punish the offending supplier. From the vantage of VSS, what is significant is both the sense that a global food and drug supply system generates novel risks, and the emerging demand to regulate this “global pipeline” of pharmaceutical and food ingredients. Developing a reliable tracking system will be a crucial step. There are similarities here to the solution proposed by Stephen Flynn to the problem of the uncertain origin of shipping containers – or to current European efforts to track the origins of GM foods, as described in this article by Javier Lezaun.
COLLABORATORY: VITAL SYSTEMS SECURITY
The Vital Systems Security collaboration examines how, today, security is being constituted as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of vital systems such as energy, transportation, communication and health is one norm in relationship to which security is being reproblematized. A central goal of the collaboration is to examine these issues through collective, conceptually driven inquiry that addresses rapidly developing contemporary problems.
