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	Farmers must stop antibiotics use in animals due to human health risk, warns WHO by World Health Organization, IPES Food, agencies   July 2018   Countries accused of failing to meet pledge to tackle antibiotic misuse - Thomson Reuters Foundation   Only half of 200 or so countries have abided by a pledge to tackle the use of antibiotics with concerted nationwide efforts, threatening lives and crops, particularly in poor countries, expert groups said on Wednesday.   Nearly 200 countries agreed in 2015 to address the issue of resistance to antimicrobials such as antibiotics, which occurs when bacteria, viruses and parasites evolve to adapt to drugs, amid fears of superbug infections with no effective treatments.   The misuse and overuse of antibiotics can cause illness and death and impact the environment and trade, said the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Organisation for Animal Health, and World Health Organization (WHO).   But their report said only about half of the nations who signed the 2015 agreement to develop national action plans within two years have done so.   "This needs to be something that heads of state need to think about," Elizabeth Tayler, head of the WHO''s antimicrobial resistance monitoring and national action plan support team, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.   She said antibiotics were used to fight child mortality, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases, but "if those drugs stop working, those gains are very vulnerable".   "We have over-used them massively, and the more we use antibiotics, the more quickly they become less effective."   European Union data shows some 700,000 people a year are estimated to die globally because of antimicrobial resistance.   The report found dozens of countries lack surveillance systems of antibiotic use in humans and animals or have no national policy or legislation to oversee its use.   Most countries require prescriptions for antibiotics in humans, but less than half limit antibiotics to promote growth in agriculture, it said.   The report said antimicrobial resistance is "a grave threat to human health and economic development" that is predicted to worsen global inequality as economic costs are borne by poorer countries. http://tmsnrt.rs/2NtOREI http://bit.ly/2mrnLCF   Nov. 2017 (World Health Organization)   Overuse of antibiotics in animals is contributing to growing drug resistance in humans with serious health implications, says global health body.   Farmers must be prevented from using powerful antibiotics on animals reared for food, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned, because of the serious risks to human health that result.   New guidelines from the global body suggest farmers should stop using any antibiotics routinely to promote growth and prevent disease in animals that are otherwise healthy, a common practice in some parts of the world, including Asia and the US. Such routine use is banned in Europe, though campaigners fear the rules are sometimes flouted.   Using antimicrobial medicines on farm animals is one of the leading causes of the rise of superbugs, resistant to all but the strongest antibiotics. Medical authorities warn that the antibiotics available to treat even relatively minor human diseases are running out because of the rapid rise of such resistance.   Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, has warned repeatedly that, a decade from now, even routine, previously low-risk operations, such as hip replacements, may become dangerous because of the risk of infections resistant to medicines.   The WHO report highlighted that in some countries, as much as 80% of antibiotic use is on farm animals. Even in some countries where routine use for enhancing growth is banned, more antibiotics are used on animals than on humans.   The use of the strongest antibiotics, a last resort for the most deadly infections affecting humans, should be banned altogether in animals, the guidelines advise.   This should apply, according to the WHO, even in cases where an illness has been diagnosed in a food-producing animal. Implementing this could require animals to be quarantined, allowed to die, or for herds to be culled in order to halt the spread of a serious disease rather than attempting to cure it.   The recommendation may be unpopular with farmers, who could risk financial loss, but is crucial to protect human health, according to the WHO, because the use of such antibiotics in animals is leading to increased resistance even to last-resort medicines, to the despair of doctors.   However, the WHO has no power to enforce its guidelines, which are up to national governments to accept or reject.   The direct warning comes as new research, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, showed that restricting antibiotic use on farms reduced the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in farm animals by up to 39%. The WHO said it had used the research to inform its new guidelines.   Restricting our remaining effective antibiotics for human use is crucial because of the lack of alternatives available. “There are very few promising options in the research pipeline” for new antibiotics to replace those that are becoming ineffective because of overuse and resistance, the WHO warned.   Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said: “A lack of effective antibiotics is as serious a security threat as a sudden and deadly disease outbreak. Strong, sustained action across all sectors is vital if we are to turn back the tide of antimicrobial resistance and keep the world safe.”   Animal herds treated with antibiotics can develop bacteria resistant to the drugs, and pass this on to humans directly, through contact with farm workers, or through food.   Kazuaki Miyagishima, director of food safety at the WHO, said the links between antibiotic use on farms and risks to human health were clear: “Scientific evidence demonstrates that overuse of antibiotics in animals can contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. The volume of antibiotics used in animals is continuing to increase worldwide, driven by a growing demand for foods of animal origin, often produced through intensive animal husbandry.”   Dr Clare Chandler of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said: “This is a welcome set of recommendations from WHO. It will be a challenge for producers to follow these recommendations to reduce antibiotic use, but possible for larger scale producers with good biosecurity. Many smaller scale farmers around the world are dependent upon antibiotics to supplement animal feed, and actions will be needed to support them to make this change which will affect their lives and livelihoods.”   http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2017/antibiotics-animals-effectiveness/en/   Expert panel identifies unacceptable toll of food and farming systems on human health. (IPES Food)   Industrial food and farming systems are making people sick in a variety of ways, and are generating staggering human and economic costs - according to a major new report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).   Decisive action can be taken on the basis of what we know, the Panel found, but is held back by the unequal power of food system actors to set the terms of debate and to influence policy.   Lead author Cecilia Rocha said: “Food systems are making us sick. Unhealthy diets are the most obvious link, but are only one of many pathways through which food and farming systems affect human health.”   “This means that there are multiple entry points for building healthier food systems. We must urgently address these impacts wherever they occur, and in parallel we must address the root causes of inequitable, unsustainable and unhealthy practices in food systems.”   Launched today at the UN Committee on World Food Security in Rome, the report places the debilitating health impacts of inadequate diets side by side with environmental health risks (e.g. nitrate-contaminated drinking water and the spread antimicrobial resistance) and the endemic occupational hazards facing food and farmworkers.   IPES-Food found that many of the severest health conditions afflicting populations around the world - from respiratory diseases to a range of cancers and systematic livelihood stresses - are linked to industrial food and farming practices, i.e. chemical-intensive agriculture, concentrated livestock production, the mass production and marketing of ultra-processed foods, and deregulated global supply chains.   The economic costs of these impacts are huge and likely to grow. Malnutrition costs the world $3.5 trillion per year, while obesity alone is estimated to cost $760 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, combined EU and US losses from exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals amount to $557 billion per year, while anti-microbrial resistant infections are already thought to be incurring $20-34 billion of annual costs in the US.   IPES-Food co-chair Olivia Yambi said: “What is troubling is how systematically these risks are generated - at different nodes of the chain and in different parts of the world.”   Fellow co-chair Olivier De Schutter, former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, added: “When all of these health impacts are considered collectively, the grounds for reform are compelling. And when health impacts are placed alongside social and environmental impacts, and the mounting costs they generate, the case for action is overwhelming. It is now clearer than ever that healthy people and a healthy planet are co-dependent.”   The report found that those without power or voice are often exposed to the greatest health risks in food systems, meaning that these impacts often go unseen, undocumented and unaddressed. "Here as elsewhere", De Schutter said, "political disempowerment and marginalization goes hand in hand with risks to lives and livelihoods."   Furthermore, the health impacts of food systems are interconnected, self-reinforcing, and complex. They are caused by many agents, and exacerbated by climate change, unsanitary conditions, and poverty – factors which are shaped by food and farming systems.   Rocha said: “The industrial food and farming model that systematically generates negative health impacts also generates highly unequal power relations. Powerful actors are therefore able to shape our understanding of food-health linkages, promoting solutions that leave the root causes of ill health unaddressed.”   “The complexity of health impacts in food systems is real and challenging, but should not be an excuse for inaction. Urgent steps can and must be taken to reform food system practices, and to transform the ways in which knowledge is gathered and transmitted, understandings are forged, and priorities are set.”   IPES-Food identified five key leverage points for building healthier food systems: i) promoting food systems thinking at all levels; ii) reasserting scientific integrity and research as a public good; iii) bringing the positive impacts of alternative food systems to light; iv) adopting the precautionary principle; and, v) building integrated food policies under participatory governance.   The report, commissioned by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, builds on IPES-Food’s first thematic report, ‘From Uniformity to Diversity’ (2016), which identified factors locking in the industrial food and farming model, and called for a paradigm shift towards diversified agroecological systems.   * Access the 120 page report: Unravelling the Food–Health Nexus: Addressing practices, political economy, and power relations to build healthier food systems: http://bit.ly/2zasRbM   http://www.ipes-food.org/publications http://www.ipes-food.org/press-cuttings Visit the related web page
	Corporate Self-Regulation is a Global Crisis by Christopher Albin-Lackey Senior Legal Advisor, Human Rights Watch   Every few years, a journalist flies to Zambia to write an article about Kabwe, “the world’s most toxic town.”   For more than a century, Kabwe was home to an enormous lead smelting plant that belched its dust into the air and poisoned the soil for miles in all directions, heedless of the damage it was causing. The plant closed in 1994, but not much has been done to clean up the worst of it. Residents—particularly children—have continued to get sick and even die from lead poisoning in terrifying numbers.   The case for corporate accountability is often made by telling stories like these, and it’s not hard to understand why.   Kabwe is a cautionary tale that reminds us what can happen when vast industrial machines are left to their own devices, unchecked and unaccountable. But the spotlight cast on places like Kabwe risks throwing half the story into shadow. When business goes wrong or goes rogue, communities are bled dry by a thousand cuts more often than they are crushed under the weight of one enormous wheel.   When Companies make their Own Rules   This is all possible because of a particular kind of lawlessness that “responsible” business actors have grown too comfortable accepting and helping to entrench. And it’s a problem that seems to exist everywhere, in different ways, from India’s mining sector, to Cambodia’s garment industry, to the debt buying industry in the United States.   The problem isn’t just that an approach without robust enforcement of the rules enables massive corporations to run roughshod over rights, but that it creates environments where it becomes impossible to hold the whole vast ocean of smaller companies that never make headlines to any coherent standard.   We live in a moment when many businesses claim to be responsible. But few acknowledge what might be their most important responsibility: to accept that they need to be bound by rules they don’t set themselves. Many leading corporations tout their adherence to meaningful voluntary standards, agreeing to be judged and sometimes audited against them—but not actually bound. Many of the same companies rabidly oppose any move to make those standards mandatory or to enforce relevant legal standards more vigorously.   The government of Ecuador has launched a process that aims to produce a binding international treaty on business and human rights. That’s still at an early stage, and its political prospects as well as its substantive content remain uncertain. In the meantime and apart from that, most of the action in the business and human rights space continues to be around the development and improvement of voluntary standards.   Outside of anti-corruption movements, where there’s been a strong trend toward global regulation, this has been true for decades. Across diverse sectors of the global economy—from private security to garment manufacture and from extractive industries to jewelry—leading companies have come together around voluntary standards meant to set a higher bar than the exceedingly low one they often encounter in law and regulation.   Some of these initiatives are valuable and important, and have improved the behavior and awareness of corporations that touch lives and communities around the world. But there’s no way to force everyone to join these clubs, and their existence doesn’t change the fundamental reality: When companies do business in a regulatory vacuum, they make their own rules.   And too often, governments are quite happy to duck the responsibility that comes with regulation, letting companies police themselves instead. But what’s happening to Zambian farmers right now, far from the glare of any media spotlight, helps illustrate the futility of that approach.   No One to Name or Shame   If you leave Lusaka at dawn, drive right through Kabwe without stopping, and keep driving many more hours north, you’ll arrive in a rural district called Serenje in the late afternoon. It is a remote, economically marginal corner of Zambia that the government thinks it can transform by laying the groundwork for enormous agricultural investments.   The megaprojects government planners envision as the cornerstones of prosperous Serenje farm blocks have yet to materialize. But this doesn’t mean that all is quiet; far from it. Commercial farmers are moving in—not the vast operations planners are still hoping to woo, but operations far larger than the small-scale agriculture most people in the area engage in. They have been lured with the promise of land, and they expect to have it.   The problem is that families—in some cases whole villages—are already there.   This was by no means a problem beyond the Zambian government’s capacity to avoid or, having failed to avoid it, to solve. But instead, the commercial famers have largely been left to their own devices to deal with families whose homes stand in the way of their ambitions.   Almost every one of the resulting stories is a different kind of quiet tragedy, as Human Rights Watch chronicled in a new report. Dozens of families who had always lived simple but comfortable lives suddenly found themselves pressured to accept paltry compensation and many became homeless and destitute. One impatient commercial farmer used tractors and chains to rip down the houses of people who did not want to make way. A group of families spent more than a year living in tents in the forest, waiting for help from government officials who seemed to have forgotten their existence.   For every Kabwe, there are many more Serenjes. And when our researchers dug all the way to the bottom of what went wrong in Serenje, they didn’t find a handful of corporate titans who could be shamed, sued, or persuaded as a way to effect large-scale change. Instead, they found a confusing array of smaller actors whose collective impact on the families around them had been devastating—each in their own uniquely terrible way.   But at root of it all were government officials who didn’t understand or care about their own responsibilities, nodding sympathetically and pointing their fingers at one another.   Zambia has laws and policies on the books that should serve as imperfect but useful tools for managing the situation in Serenje, but everyone is ignoring them. Key local officials were entirely unaware of regulations meant to govern any involuntary resettlement of rural communities. The Zambian Environmental Management Agency struggled to find records indicating whether commercial farmers in Serenje had bothered to conduct mandatory Environmental Impact Assessments.   Business leaders need to acknowledge that being responsible means more than just a deliberately narrow focus on their own immediate behavior. It means accepting the need for tough enforcement of rules that bind themselves as well as others to respect rights they might otherwise threaten. And business leaders need to understand that anything less means helping to entrench an approach that inevitably leads to shattered lives. Visit the related web page
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