nice AMA from the experts directly.
First answer:
> First, a lot of antibiotic resistance appears to be driven by the agricultural use of antibiotics as growth enhancers. Thus, we can be savvy consumers and support and be willing to absorb the costs of the efforts to get antibiotics out of the meat industry.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=livestock+last-resort+a...
Here's a nice batch of results.
It's a well known problem, not some esoteric trivia. It is also the biggest cause of selective pressure, not antibacterial soaps or human medicine misuse of antibiotics.
With these bans in place, it doesn't seem necessary to implement a tax on their use. Perhaps a ban on importing meat that was produced using antibiotics for growth.
Either way I've got some bad news for you
one gives antibiotics to one's thousands of chickens to spur growth (body growth - gaining mass), not to protect the consumer from disease.
giving antibiotics to poultry extremely increases mass gains. post-slaughter processes add chemicals that keep meat from rotting, eradicating some of those living harmful bacteria that just so happen to turn flesh into unwanted dark piece of s+=t.
Farming without prophylactic antibiotics--where antibiotics are only used to treat sick animals, as they are in humans--could meet the demand for food easily.
But in reality, meat is an inefficient form of producing food, with complements humans can easily shift to. So the way you get less antibiotic use in livestock in a capitalist decision market is by reducing the demand for livestock. Taxes do a great job at reducing demand.
There are some vegetables that are easily grown in unsuitable areas with GM, and some people do use pesticides and GMOs to "defeat" the market but if international logistics weren't so hard it would be easier to just import the stuff.
Similar industry, completely plant driven, is cotton agriculture for clothes - to ensure proper demand you need GMO or pesticides.
When it comes to beans, lentils, soybean for humans (although most of it is for fish farms, poultry and livestock), wheat, corn, rice, all sorts of fruits, pesticides come in hand, but there's more than enough if space was taken from dairy/meat and given to those.
91% of Amazon is cut for animal agriculture. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...
It's just 7 billion people, while you have to raise 50 billion chickens, 1 billion cows, -- about 150 billion animals yearly just to get them from baby form to somewhat of an adult form. That requires a lot of food, way more than 7 billion avg. 150 pound humans.
edit: realistically, this problem is unsolvable, just like US and China and others won't really struggle lowering their CO2 footprint, so will not Brazil, USA, India, Australia, Denmark and others when it comes to reduction of their meat/dairy output. If we were some nice unified Humanity maybe things would be different.
Things like the fall of the Soviet Union, desegregation in the US, man on the moon, etc. Even things that required great international cooperation have happened. Like the eradication of smallpox and polio, the creation of the United Nations, etc.
But the reduction of meat consumption and reliance on factory farming need not be done on a global level to be worthwhile. It can happen one country at a time. Even one person or one animal at a time will be helpful, even if it won't solve everything. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
> I spy with my little eye someone who'd die early, in a world without antibiotics.
This is a joke, right? People ate meat safely for thousands of years before antibiotics were invented.
Easy to say when you're wealthy, no so much when you consider yourself healthy but poor.
But at the end of the day, not everyone can afford organic pasture raised eggs at $7/dozen. And the problem is that we've all gotten so used to eggs at $0.50/dozen or chicken at $1/pound that I don't think society as a whole could deal with the cost of meat equalizing to reflect the true cost of non-factory farmed production.
We certainly could if we had to, but so far we haven't had to.
or give extreme tax benefits to those that don't use antibiotics.