Nice editorial in the New York Times yesterday about progress with the government’s efforts to curb the use of antibiotics as a growth promotion tool in livestock. Sadly, I am one of the skeptics mentioned in the article.
First of all, you have to look at the economics. Commodity farmers use antibiotics because it is profitable to do so. Put antibiotics in the feed—animals grow faster (nobody yet knows why). More importantly, if you don’t put antibiotics in the feed, you will be competed out of business by those who do. This is the same dynamic as the doping problem in professional sports. If you can’t stop elite athletes from putting harmful illegal drugs into their own bodies to make money, how can we expect to stop conventional farmers from doing it to their livestock—especially with a voluntary labeling program?
(Just in case it is not clear—we do not put antibiotics or added hormones in our feed.)
The trick is to make it unprofitable to feed sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to food animals. Since the benefit is fixed by the marketplace, the main lever that policy makers can pull is to try to increase the cost of the practice. Requiring a veterinary prescription for any feed additive antibiotics adds a cost (albeit a minor one to the producer). The real lever here would be to increase the cost of the drugs to the point where the benefit they produce would be less than cost of administering them.
Like Omar, I’m skeptical that this will actually happen. Big Pharma has too much too lose.
It’s a prisoner’s dilemma situation in philosophy. In economics it’s an ice-hockey helmet dilemma.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/07/the_economics_of_hockey_helmet
Given the choice in some constellation people will choose harmful behaviour. When they understand the problem they will want to be regulated. I think this applies here.