By Farai Mabeza

ANTIMICROBIAL resistance (AMR) is now the biggest threat to food security after climate change, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s sub-regional coordinator for southern Africa, David Phiri, has said.
AMR occurs when antimicrobials, used to kill or neutralise pathogens, lose their effectiveness because pathogens would have become immune.
Antimicrobials are used to control bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi and play a major role in agriculture and food safety as well as in human and animal health.
“It is the single most important threat now to food security aside from climate change. If the antibiotics get into the food chain because they are not prescribed properly, the meat that we eat will end up with too much traces of antibiotics which will affect resistance to those antibiotics should they be prescribed to a human by a doctor,” Phiri told The Financial Gazette shortly after the launch of Zimbabwe’s AMR Situation Analysis Report and National Action Plan.
He said that currently, many farmers were getting antibiotics for their livestock from the shelves.
“Veterinary services and medicines that are used to control animal diseases can easily affect the food chain. That’s why I think that any medicines should be prescribed by trained veterinary officers. The farmers don’t know their proper use and so all this increases antimicrobial resistance,” he said.
The principal director of livestock and veterinary services in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development, Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatulu, said that overuse and suboptimal use of medicines were influencing the development of AMR.
She said in livestock rearing, the interaction between animals and the environment was very close and the occurrence of disease quite frequent.
“Mismanagement of antibiotics can be counterproductive because now we have a shorter range of antibiotics we can use which means that some disease may begin to cause major losses in production,” Ushewokunze-Obatulu said.
Antimicrobial drugs play a critical role in the treatment of diseases; their use is essential to protect both human and animal health.
However, antimicrobials are often misused for treatment and prevention of diseases in the livestock sector, aquaculture as well as crop production.
These actions are often associated with the potential risk of emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistant micro-organisms.
Zimbabwe currently has a shortage of veterinary personnel leaving farmers in many areas taking animal health matters into their own hands.
“Veterinary supervision of farmers is not adequate and it’s one of the things we need to look at. The distribution of veterinarians and access to veterinarians is not adequate,” Ushewokunze-Obatulu said.
Proper use of antimicrobials to treat terrestrial and aquatic food producing animals and plants, help to assure food safety and quality, animal health and welfare and farmer livelihoods.
While the majority of antimicrobial use in agriculture tends to be for food animal production, antimicrobials such as antibiotics and fungicides are also applied to agricultural crops and are used in the agro-industries, for instance, for the production of bio-fuel by-products.
Following administration, up to 90 percent of antimicrobials may be excreted un-metabolised in water and animal waste with subsequent spread into the environment.
This in turn, may increase the development of AMR microorganisms through exposure to antimicrobial residues and further spread of resistance through transfer of resistance genes to other microorganisms.
“AMR is not a stand-alone problem, as it affects human health, animal health, plant health, and the environment and threatens to rollback key health and economic gains of the last one hundred years if it is not contained.
“Our true success as partners in this fight will only be measured by the extent to which the national action plan will be implemented and the tangible results that we will be able to show,” Phiri said.
He added that FAO would be supporting the development of guidelines in food and agriculture to reduce the negative impacts of inappropriate use of antimicrobial drugs in these sectors.