Selling Antibiotics as Animal Feeds, Stabilizing Pharmaceutical Socio-Technical Systems in France and UK Post-1945

• In Event: Antimicrobials in Livestock: Practices, Technologies, Markets, and Regulations

Abstract

After the Second World War, Europe adopts a cognitive frame that glorifies the Fordist model of intensive production. Amongst many technologies, the massive use of drugs contribute to modify breeding conditions so much so some consider the rise of veterinary pharmacy as an answer to intensive farming. Without studying the way antibiotics were used by veterinarians to cure or prevent diseases, this paper analyses the issues underlying their introduction as feed additives in France and the United Kingdom, on the early 1950s. Built on new archives from the French and British Ministries of Agriculture, Health or of the Treasury, as well as on veterinary or animal science journals, and on leaflets or internal documents from pharmaceutical industries, this paper shows how the transformation of breeding techniques through the use of antibiotics is deeply intertwined with other transformations, such as the ones of European pharmaceutical industries and medical practices. This paper does not focus on the side effects antibiotics have on public health (resistant bacteria, food allergies…). However, it shows how these issues, already at stake in the 1950s, were lightened in comparison to the benefits of having healthy pharmaceutical industries, partners of the construction of a free healthcare system for the French and the British. Through that angle, antibiotics no more appear as agricultural tools to improve food productivity but as mere elements of stabilization of more complex socio-technical systems which provide cheap drugs for human patients in the two countries.

Author

• Delphine Berdah, Université Paris-Sud/Paris Saclay