Drug resistanceEconomists propose market-driven solutions to the problem of antibiotic use in agriculture
Fifty-one tons of antibiotics are consumed daily in the United States, of which 80 percent are used in agriculture. To minimize the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, Aidan Hollis of the University of Calgary is proposing the imposition of an antibiotic tax on food producers, thus encouraging them to distinguish between good and bad use of antibiotics, since the fee would force farmers to purchase antibiotics only when needed to treat sick animals and not for non-illness purposes.Timothy Richards of Arizona State University says that more regulations or a tax would run the risk of harming the agriculture industry. He says that farmers and ranchers should clearly label their products as containing or not containing antibiotics, and then market dynamics would operate by “letting people follow labels and buy or not buy meats where antibiotics are used.”
Fifty-one tons of antibiotics are consumed daily in the United States, of which 80 percent are used in agriculture. To minimize the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, economist Aidan Hollis of the University of Calgary has proposed an economic, or market-driven, solution.
Antibiotics are used in agriculture to treat sick animals, prevent sickness, and to make animals gain weight more quickly. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued voluntary guidelines last month to discourage the use of antibiotics for the purpose of increasing the size of livestock, but CNBC reports that Hollis says that a more effective policy would be to impose a fee on all antibiotics used by the American agriculture industry. “The idea is to distinguish between the good use of antibiotics and the bad,” said Hollis.
Hollis believes that the fee would force farmers to purchase antibiotics only when needed to treat sick animals and not for non-illness purposes.
Farmers reject the idea of an added fee because doing so will increase the cost of operations. Seventy percent of the total cost of animal production is already attributed to animal feed.
“There’s no doubt it would add costs to the whole process of getting meat or poultry, but this is clearly a health issue that needs to be addressed,” Hollis said.
Hollis is yet to offer details about how the fee would be collected or who would pay the fee, but he claims that his proposed fee could be used to help research and develop better antibiotics. “There’s little money being used to find new bacteria resistant drugs, and that’s a problem,” he said.
Timothy Richards, a professor of agribusiness at Arizona State University, questions some of the science behind antibiotics resistance. He told CNBC that more regulations or a tax would run the risk of harming the agriculture industry.
“You’d have to have the FDA come out and determine which animal is sick and which is not for antibiotic use,” he said. “That’s impossible to do.” Richards believes that market dynamics would provide a better solution by “letting people follow labels and buy or not buy meats where antibiotics are used.”
Kelli Ludlum, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, an advocacy group for farmers and ranchers, says that more regulation or a antibiotics tax would increase the cost of doing business and may harm the agriculture industry. She notes that the FDA’s voluntary laws which ask pharmaceutical companies to remove growth enhancement and feed efficiency indications from the approved uses of antibiotics will minimize the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. “The companies making the drugs will indicate which ones are not available for growth promotion. Farmers will not be using them,” she said.
“We really don’t want to use antibiotics, because that means we’ve got sick animals,” Dave Daley, second vice president of the California Cattlemen’s Association, told the San Luis Obispo Tribune, but “we want to make sure antibiotics, as needed, can be used by small farmers and ranchers to care for cattle that are truly sick.”
Daley also said that legislators who contemplate imposing legal limits on the use of antibiotics in agriculture must provide food producers the autonomy needed to raise healthy livestock. “Frankly, most cattlemen don’t want to see indiscriminate use of antibiotics, either,” Daley said, but “we need the flexibility to be able to use them when we need them.”
Some California lawmakers agree. Assemblyman Frank Bigelow (R-O’Neals) said his colleagues should wait for the FDA process to play out before advancing additional regulations of the use of antibiotics.
“There’s a hysteria that starts to occur, and people jump on bandwagons without knowing all the facts or looking at all the facts,” said Bigelow, a cattleman identifiable on the Assembly floor by his distinctive white rancher’s hat. “We already have an agency, the FDA, who has the oversight powers,” he added, “and we need to let them use those powers.”
— Read more in Aidan Hollis and Ziana Ahmed, “Preserving Antibiotics, Rationally,” New England Journal of Medicine 369 (26 December 2013): 2474-76 (DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1311479)
