HowIndia can cut antibiotic use in farm feed WHAT PEOPLE EAT

Antibiotics use in animal food could increase 82 per cent by 2030, putting human lives in danger

discontinued in the US.”

The inappropriate use of antimicrobials in food animals has been cited as a leading cause of rising antimicrobial resistance at a 2016 United Nations General Assembly meeting on ways to tackle the problem.

In India, the impact of the practice is already visible. Poultry farms in Punjab that participated in the earlier CCDEP study reported high levels of multidrug-resistant bacteria that can easily escape into the environment, said Laxminarayan.

“Levels of multidrugresistance were close to 90 per cent in biological samples obtained from animals on those farms,” he said. “The spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria would mean that many more people could die from common infectious diseases.” Antibiotics are freely and cheaply available in India. This is the biggest reason for the reckless use of antimicrobials as growth promoters in poultry farms. How can this be changed? “Agencies with the regulatory authority—such as the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India—should move quickly in this direction to avoid further degradation of antibiotic effectiveness,” said Laxminarayan.

In June 2017, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) brought out a draft notification prescribing residual limits for antibiotics, veterinary drugs and pharmacologically active substances in meat, poultry, eggs and milk. This came six years after the authority prescribed antibiotic residual limits for fish and fishery products and honey.

“Antimicrobial resistance is an evolving area, we have been studying the implications of the use of antibiotics as growth promoters in food animals in India and are willing to address this concern,” Pawan Kumar Agarwal, CEO of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, told IndiaSpend.

“But improving practices is a gradual process,” he said. “Bringing out the draft notification is a first step towards creating a safer food ecosystem.”

He estimated that it would take another 90 to 120 days for the regulation to be introduced. Antibiotics used to cut costs on sanitation, diet By specifying the limits of permissible antibiotic residue in food animals, the FSSAI regulation, when it is framed, will indirectly make it unlawful to use the drugs beyond a certain limit.

The new study proposes clearly capping the use of antibiotics in food animals to a specified limit and increasing the prices of veterinary antibiotics to dissuade use.

Both these moves are critical, said Meatconsumption in countries with mostantibiotics in food animals Poultry Beef & veal Pork Sheep Laxminarayan, “because animal feed is practically being used as an industrial input, to avoid the costs that farmers would incur to raise the animals in hygienic conditions on a healthy diet”.

In the 18 farms that Laxminarayan’s team visited during the first study, it was found that large flocks, more than 50,000 birds, were kept in confined areas lacking proper sanitation. Organic nurturing results in higher costs, price To understand why poultry farmers use antibiotics as cheap and easily accessible growth boosters, consider the case of an agro enterprise that has adopted organic practices.

At Kansal & Kansal Agro Farms in Haryana, chicken feed is sourced only from pesticide-free farms and then mixed with herbs. The chickens are kept in a partially temperature controlled environment. The farm also invests in research to improve farming practices.

These practices keep the animals healthy but also result in higher production costs to “about double the cost of farms using antibiotics”, said Mohan Lal Kansal, founder and director of the farm and a former professor of animal science at the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. How to cut antibiotic misuse by more than half High-income countries with highly productive livestock sectors—such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands—use antibiotics sparingly. The limit is less than 50 milligrams of antibiotics per population corrective

The need for greater consumer and farmer awareness

One reason why many European nations adopted ethical and organic practices in its animal products industry is the high level of consumer awareness in its markets. In India, consumers of animal products have yet to become demanding.

When Kansal started out in business, he travelled to Hyderabad and Bengaluru to talk about his decision to adhere to organic poultry farming. He found southern consumers more understanding of the impact of antibiotics misuse and the benefits of organic product, he said.

“Customers in the south were willing to pay double the price of an ordinary egg for an organic egg, plus 40 per cent more to cover the cost of transportation,” he said. “Less aware consumers are usually more price conscious and that fuels the use of antibiotics in food.”

Low farmer awareness is also a concern. In the absence of regulation, most of the poultry feed available in the market is medicated. But the majority of poultry farmers in Punjab that Laxminarayan’s team surveyed said they didn’t know this.