Kristof on Antibiotics

In his Op-Ed for yesterday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the effect that antibiotics in mainstream agriculture have on human health. He cites the case of Thomas M. Dukes, who is thought to have acquired E. coli from tainted meat, and raises the flag about the dire consequences of using excessive antibiotics in raising animals for consumption. While I agree with Kristof wholeheartedly that we need to rein in our use of hormones and antibiotics in agricultural production, I believe a nuanced position is in order.

Our decisions about the food we eat would be much simpler if we could easily find out the conditions under which hormones and antibiotics were used to raise our meat. I have a really hard time accepting the argument for hormone use, but antibiotics might be a different matter. Were the animals given excessive amounts in order to promote survival under compromised conditions, or in doses that kept them well when they got sick, even though they were living on pristine pasture?

The problem is that it's hard to figure out where the threshold is between humane treatment of animals (if the cow is sick, do you let it die in the name of antibiotic-free meat, or medicate it?) and over-use in order to make more cheap meat. When the 2009 MIT Sloan Agribusiness Trek visited Missouri River Feeders in North Dakota last year, our host described why he doesn't do organic meat: if a cow isn't well, he wants to be able to use the resources he has to make it better. He wants to keep his costs as low as possible, so he makes a managerial decision about when to give an animal antibiotics (expensive stuff). Some would say he is limiting the use of antibiotics in his herd by using a cost-benefit analysis.

The other side of the argument is that because antibiotics can keep even sick cows alive, the supply of beef increases, driving down its price, and requiring feedlot managers and beef farmers to produce in greater volumes to make a profit. The picture might look something like this (note that the + and – indicate whether the variable moves in the same or opposite direction as the preceding variable, and not whether it increases or decreases).

In this depiction, when the use of antibiotics increases, animals are more likely to survive, which drives the farmer’s cost of production down, drives the price of meat down, and increases demand for meat. The increase in demand increases the farmer’s incentive to produce meat, and all else equal, increases the number of animals in meat production, which will in turn (again, all else equal) require even more use of antibiotics. In other words, by using antibiotics we may be perpetuating the market for inexpensive meat.

This isn’t the full story, though. As Kristof explains, the increased use of antibiotics is having a measurable effect on human health, creating another effect that balances demand for meat that might look something like this picture, in which the increased risk of disease associated with meat production decreases the demand for meat and reduces the incentive for farmers to produce greater and greater volumes of meat.

The point is that there is not a simple answer to whether antibiotics should or should not be used in raising animals for food, as the answer is specific to the conditions and to where the farmer and consumer fall on the spectrum of philosophies: use antibiotics to keep production up and prices down (I cringe at this one), use antibiotics sparingly and raise a healthy herd of cattle (I like this one for small producers who can’t afford to lose an animal to disease and also can’t afford organic certification), or avoid antibiotics altogether (I see this being appealing to larger producers who get a premium for their organic certification and can afford the risk of not treating sick animals).

There are market dynamics at play that help to balance the perpetual use of antibiotics to produce our food. In other words, a shift in demand for meat that is raised under healthy conditions (which in some circumstances could include use of antibiotics), could have a more sustained effect on shifting how we produce our meat than could legislation or making pat demands of large meat producers. That leaves the challenge of identifying whom we can trust to find the appropriate threshold, enforce it, and sell us beef.