When the smoke clears from the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters and the blinding pain of loss manages to sharpen our judgment, we as a nation must address glaring security problems in our food production, processing, and retail system.

For several decades, shored up by an illusion of peace, we have allowed university professors and business pundits to chant a mantra of efficiency driving consolidation in key segments of agriculture to ridiculously Goliathan proportions. Even the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, through its Center for Rural America led by economist Mark Drabenstott argues that soon there will only be a few “efficient” cells of production scattered throughout the Midwest, that marginal lands in the farther reaches of the west will be vacated to other uses and that the business of food production and processing will concentrate not just in ever fewer hands, but in ever fewer places. Many economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, argue this is a good thing, keeping prices low to consumers and food production efficient.

Efficiency took on the charisma of a religion as agribusiness giant’s profits have soared to record levels, consumers pay record prices for beef, and independent farmers and ranchers are driven out of business as their receipts languish below the cost of production.

Labor in processing plants has faired equally poorly, with wages tumbling to less than the base cost of living. Twenty years ago, a packing house job had a decent wage averaging over $18 an hour, with a stable domestic labor force. Today, we have giant packing houses slaughtering thousands of head of livestock a week, with labor comprised of foreign nationals from a multitude of countries including some that have been known to harbor terrorist cells. Periodic crackdowns by the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the largest packing houses have failed to stem the use of illegal labor. All of this leaves a huge hole in our ability to protect our food supply.

Liberalized trade agreements have increased our vulnerability to sabotage. Hamburger that used to be imported in ten-pound packages now enters the U.S. in one-ton vats making it extremely vulnerable to deliberate contamination with phisteria, e-coli, salmonella, and a host of other food borne illnesses.

Efficiency gave agribusiness giants like Nestle and Cargill record profits. It gave the rest of us a terribly vulnerable food supply and a weakened production chain.

While much of our focus will be upon creating a war machine, an equally crucial defense-and offense-against this war of terrorist extremists should be to create an impenetrable infrastructure that can withstand the most diabolical scheme of terrorists. The majority of our protection here is up to us. It is incumbent upon us-consumers and producers alike-to rebuild a healthy food production system, where diversity and decentralization takes in a great new era of redevelopment in American business.

Some might suggest we just hire a small army of well-armed security guards for giant super stores and mega-processing plants, place armed patrols on every street corner, but to what extent are we willing to live under a police state? To what extent are we willing to allow our freedoms to be eroded to protect corporate business, that under our forgotten antitrust laws, never should have been allowed to get that large in the first place?

We must dust off antitrust laws and reactivate their aggressive enforcement. It’s crucial to reform an infrastructure that leaves us as nothing more than exposed fools to this new era of war. We must actively pursue the appointment of judges who recognize their importance and campaign for public prosecutors in our states’ attorney general offices who see diversity and decentralization as our best protection. Diversification and decentralization of ownership in agricultural production and processing are crucial protections. One plant attacked out of several thousand is insignificant, compared to one of twelve IBP plants brought to a screeching halt. Just an attack on corporate headquarters of many of these massive agribusiness giants could bring the entire agricultural economy to a grinding stop.

As agribusiness in the last thirty years has concentrated to more central processing locations, rural America has been cheated of an opportunity to retain the value of their production through participating in processing what they grow in their own rural communities. Let’s begin to return the health and vitality to rural America by shifting the processing industry, the very industry that absorbs rural production, to the countryside where it belongs. Let us, in addition, shed the dangerous belief that consolidation is good and create an atmosphere that rewards innovation to the many creative geniuses scattered more safely across the great nation, rather than allowing the few obese Archer Daniels Midland’s the corporate pork barrels to the world, to continue to absorb hundreds of millions in federal subsidies.

Not only winning the war against terrorism depends on it, but the total lifeline of this nation is at stake.