The Political Dimensions of Antimicrobial Resistance: Intercorporate Mobilization on AMR 2016-2024

• In Event: Enviromental Politics

Abstract

Profligate application of antibacterial drugs, particularly in agricultural settings, has led to their accelerated self-obsolescence. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the evolutionary process by which microbes acquire the ability to withstand antimicrobial drugs, poses an escalating threat to global public health, with more severe consequences already manifesting across the global south. The acute acceleration of AMR in recent decades can only be explained as a social, political, and economic problem stemming from the globalization of industrial animal agriculture and increasing reliance on antimicrobial chemical inputs. Globalization of this form of pharmaceutical-dependent agriculture has worked alongside regulatory gaps between nations and persistent political activity on behalf of industry to produce a Pandemoscene characterized by accelerated zoonotic spillover events and associated human pandemics. Despite broad intersectoral mobilization informed by a OneHealth framework since 2016, actions taken to address AMR have tended to neglect agribusiness’s preponderant role in producing the crisis, promoting voluntary industry self-regulation and focusing instead on prospects for antimicrobial stewardship among interested stakeholders. This paper provides a novel theoretical and empirical assessment of antimicrobial stewardship, an account of the governing bodies and industries involved in its conception, and an examination of the prospects of industry-led mobilization on AMR. Drawing on antibiotic trade data, as well as original political networks developed by the author, this investigation uses network methodologies to address several interrelated questions regarding corporate political mobilization on the issue of AMR between 2016 and 2024. Evidence of independent as well as concerted political activity among pharmaceutical and agribusiness interests are shown to steer the priorities of global health governance and systematically produce market and state-based solutions to AMR that do not directly engage agribusiness’ dependency on high volumes of antimicrobial inputs.

Author

• David B. Capelle, University of Oregon