The weaponization of food has become a reality.
Christophe Hansen, the EU’s Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, said those words this week after a cyberattack hit hundreds of French supermarkets. He warned of exactly that.
Around 150 Intermarché stores were hit overnight. Attackers reached the cooling systems and set them to defrost, so fridges and freezers heated to 50C for about six hours, and food had to be thrown away. Fires were reported in some stores. It followed warnings that hackers are seeking to cause physical damage.
That is the point where a cyber story stops being about data. It becomes a story about dinner.
France was under strain elsewhere too. What began as student protests soon escalated into direct challenges to the government as a whole.
Now widen the lens.
The same weekend in Pakistan, the president declared a state of emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and suspended its government, led by jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s party, ahead of a planned march on Islamabad. Federal officials accused the province of disengaging from the fight against terrorism. The party calls it a “disguised coup.”
On Monday in New Delhi, opposition parties marched to the Supreme Court over a purge of voter lists, after police detained thousands of activists over the weekend. More than 130 million names have been removed. The Election Commission and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) say the revision has no political motive.
Three countries, three very different events. Yet the same question sits underneath each one: do people still trust the systems that quietly run their lives?
Trust works a bit like refrigeration. Nobody thinks about it while it holds. The moment the temperature rises, everything inside starts to spoil.
A cold chain, a provincial mandate and a voter list all depend on that invisible confidence. Once it is shaken, even by suspicion alone, the damage spreads faster than any investigation can keep up.
We spend a lot of time asking, “What could go wrong?”
Perhaps we should also ask: “If this fails, what depends on it?”
Because the system that breaks is rarely the only one that was holding something up.
Come and join us on the Global Risk Forum this week. We’ll follow the crises unfolding around the world, look at how they feed into one another, and explore what might come next. We’d love you to be part of the conversation.
- Global Risk Forum 469
- Thursday, 15th October at 16:00 BST
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- Friday, 16th October at 09:00 BST
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