The new WMD: Agriculture and Weapons of Mass Disruption

Precision gene-editing biotechnologies are inherently dual-use: potentially powerful for understanding and treating disease but exploitable by actors seeking to develop offensive biological capabilities, for example by enhancing plant and animal pathogenicity. International law typically conceptualises bioweapons as strategic ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’: human-focussed, deployed in war-like contexts by state actors, for military advantage. That law lacks robust reporting, verification, and enforcement provisions, alongside ineffectiveness in detecting bioweapon development. Exploiting weaknesses in existing legal frameworks, gene-editing biotechnologies could be deployed with impunity against agricultural targets by state/non-state actors pursuing economic, environmental, or other agendas rather than military advantage. As novel ‘Weapons of Mass Disruption’ such activities – despite obvious hostile motivations – may evade detection during development, or in deployment under international agricultural disease-surveillance frameworks focused on biosafety rather than detection of wrongdoing. The absence of war-like operations may similarly exclude application of the prohibitions. Although criminal prosecution of individual non-state actors as eco-terrorists or corporate offenders under domestic laws may be possible, evidence of criminal intent and identification of actors may be challenging, given the comparatively small scale and low levels of technological sophistication potentially required for dissemination of agricultural pathogens for hostile purposes.