New EU rules on farm antibiotic use
On 28th January 2022, landmark veterinary medicines regulations, introducing new restrictions on farm antibiotic use, came into effect across the EU.
The new EU rules include a ban on all routine use of antibiotics on farms, including preventative group treatments.
The legislation will not prevent farmers from giving antibiotics to a group of animals when disease has been diagnosed in some of the animals - such treatments are called "metaphylaxis". Metaphylaxis, however, will not be allowed to be carried out routinely, and will be permitted "only when the risk of spread of an infection or of an infectious disease in the group of animals is high and where no other appropriate alternatives are available."
Furthermore, antibiotics can no longer be "used to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry or lack of care or to compensate for poor farm management".
The new regulations have the potential to significantly improve how antibiotics are used in European farming, and to have a major impact on how animals are farmed. Since they no longer are permitted to use antibiotics to compensate for inadequate husbandry and poor hygiene, farmers should respond by improving the conditions in which the animals are kept.
However, there is a lack of joined-up thinking in the EU approach, which suggests the regulations may not be fully implemented in practice. This is because, while using antibiotics to compensate for poor hygiene and inadequate husbandry has been prohibited, unhygienic conditions and inadequate husbandry practices known to contribute to greater need for antibiotics, remain entirely legal.
Full implementation of the regulations will therefore require fundamental reform of EU livestock-farming systems, and a move away from many of the practices of highly intensive farming.
European Member States are also now required to collect antibiotic-usage data by farm-animal species, in addition to farm antibiotic sales data. The first EU report on farm antibiotic use and sales data will be published in 2025, and will provide evidence on the extent to which the new regulations are being fully implemented.
UK finally bans routine farm antibiotic use
On 17 May 2024, the UK finally introduced a ban on routine farm antibiotic use. This was a major goal of Alliance campaigning.
The new UK veterinary medicines regulations are largely based on the EU's 2022 regulations. Unfortunately, despite the British government having previously said that it intended to fully align with the EU on this issue, some very important aspects of the EU regulations have been dropped.
In particular, the UK government has refused to implement a full ban on using antibiotics prophylactically on groups of animals and has also failed to introduce mandatory antibiotic-use data collection.
Prophylactic antibiotic use will, however, only be permitted "in exceptional circumstances where the risk of an infection or of an infectious disease is very high and where the consequences of not prescribing the product are likely to be severe”. When group prophylaxis occurs, a management review will have to be carried out by a veterinary surgeon "to identify factors and implement measures for the purpose of eliminating the need for any future such administration."
Similarly to their EU counterparts, British farmers will not be able to use antibiotics to "to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry, or poor farm management practices.”
As in the EU, it will be important to ensure that the regulations are fully implemented and that antibiotics are not still used to prop up intensive-farming systems using poor animal husbandry.
Trade
Antibiotic-resistant superbugs know no boundaries and can travel globally on food. To protect consumer health, trade policy must not allow the importation of food produced to low standards. Cheap imported food, produced with routine antibiotic use could also threaten the competitiveness of British farming. UK trade policy should aim to protect UK food standards and to promote improvements in global standards.
Our report on farm antibiotics and trade deals found that in 2018 the US and Canada were using about five times more antibiotics on their farms per livestock unit than the UK.
In December 2024, the UK formally joined the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade group. This is significant as the Alliance has calculated that several of its members use farm antibiotics at far higher levels than the UK. Also of concern is the continued importation of chicken meat from Poland, where antibiotic use is very high in farming, leading to outbreaks of multi-resistant Salmonella in the UK which have caused fatalities.
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