Supermarkets named and shamed over use of antibiotics in meat

At the top of the table for better practice are Co-op, M&S, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose who have now introduced bans on their suppliers using antibiotics for routine disease prevention. Morrisons has a ban in some species but not in others. Aldi has some restrictions but no total ban. Asda and Lidl have no restrictions other than the minimum required by law.

Waitrose has the most comprehensive antibiotics policies. The next best policies were those of M&S, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. Lidl is the only supermarket included in the survey that had no publicly available antibiotic policies.

The World Health Organisation has warned that farmers must stop using powerful antibiotics on animals because of the serious risk to human health. Historically antibiotics have been routinely fed to farmed animals as a preventative measure to stop them catching diseases. However, with the rise of antibiotic resistance and the lack of new antibiotics being discovered there is pressure on the British farming industry to stop this practice.

In their report the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics says that for there to be real change in farming practices there needs to be a change in legislation:

“It is remarkable that in 2017 it is still entirely legal in the UK and in most of Europe to feed antibiotics to groups of animals when no disease has been diagnosed in any of the animals. The solution to this problem is clear – a ban on preventative group treatments – and is already being implemented successfully in some European countries.”

Below is a table in which the Alliance outline their findings on supermarket use of antibiotics.

 

The report also shows that there are far greater reductions in antibiotic use with less intensive farming methods. Cóilín Nunan, scientific adviser to the Alliance, said: 

“intensive livestock farmers have much to learn from the practices of more extensive farming systems, which often have minimal antibiotic use. Moving to later weaning of piglets, using slower-growing chickens, lowering stocking densities of animals kept indoors and keeping cattle on pasture are all essential and achievable measures which can lower antibiotic use.”

The Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics is an independent project run as a collaboration of Compassion in World Farming, Soil Association and Sustain.

Compassion in World Farming are asking the public to email our ministers to support an EU wide ban on the routine use of antibiotics on farms.