The Food and Agriculture Sector-Specific Plan (FA SSP) is a national sectoral plan of the United States. Its main objective is to guide and integrate the FA Sector’s efforts to improve security and resilience, and to describe how the FA Sector contributes to national critical infrastructure security and resilience as set forth in Presidential Policy Directive 21: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience (PPD-21). The mission of the FA Sector is to protect against a disruption anywhere in the food system that would pose a serious threat to public health, safety, welfare, or to the national economy. In order to ensure food security and to increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters, the Plan aims to continue to promote the combined Federal, State, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT), and private sector capabilities to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from manmade and natural disasters that threaten the national food and agriculture infrastructure; to improve sector situational awareness through enhanced intelligence communications and information sharing among all sector partners; to assess all-hazards risks, including cybersecurity, to the FA Sector; and improve analytical methods to bolster prevention and response efforts, as well as increase resilience in the FA Sector; to define, identify, collect, and store food and agriculture critical infrastructure systems’ information that is pertinent to risk management; to establish methods and processes by which these systems can be evaluated, to assist in consideration of potential threats, to assess vulnerabilities, and to develop and implement protective measures and mitigation strategies; to identify those systems that might be affected by a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or manmade accident to know the status of the regulated facilities following all hazards; to define and identify critical infrastructure assets, systems, and networks and, in many cases, their associated functions; to collect the critical infrastructure information for the FA Sector; to establish a formal process to update and verify critical infrastructure information; to address overlaps and interdependencies to aid in future planning, integration, and coordination not only to eliminate redundancy in efforts, but also to create a synergistic relationship in which each sector can benefit from its respective overlaps; to identify appropriate approaches and methodologies to conduct cyber vulnerability assessments; to improve situational awareness through enhanced intelligence communication and information sharing, within and across sectors, to enable risk-informed decision-making; to develop the foundational understanding of critical infrastructure systems and systems dynamics; to develop integrated and scalable risk assessment and management approaches; to develop integrated and proactive capabilities, technologies, and methods to support secure and resilient infrastructure; to harness the power of data sciences to create unified, integrated situational awareness and to understand consequences of action; to build a crosscutting culture of critical infrastructure security and resilience R&D collaboration; to assess the vulnerability of the FA supply chain to natural and manmade threats and hazards; to assess current protocols for information sharing, identify communication gaps and barriers, and develop processes to support optimal information sharing between FA Sector partners; to improve the ability to prevent, detect, and respond to animal and plant disease outbreaks and food contamination, whether naturally occurring or intentional, through the expansion of laboratory systems and qualified personnel; to enhance and integrate existing information sharing approaches; to raise awareness of and evaluate potential cyber risks, and encourage FA Sector members to use the NIST Cybersecurity Framework; to continue to resolve livestock disposal and related decontamination issues; and to engage all levels of the FA Sector in national planning efforts and goals.
United States of America · 2015-01-01