View From Europe


By Colin Ley


Look what happens when two sides agree Having spent more than three-and-a-half years preparing for Brexit and then finding ourselves virtually back at square one, subject to who ticks what on December 12, has set me thinking about which factors actually affect business plans and prospects and which no longer matter. We seem to have got ourselves ready for just about all eventualities


over the past 12 months as departure deadlines have come and gone with monotonous regularity. It’s much the same with warnings of economic ruin or the promise of a freedom trade boost ‘beyond belief’. The point is that both the warnings and the promises have moved beyond belief and have done so in equal measure, with supporters and opponents still divided pretty much 50/50. My initial thought process was triggered by study results from the


UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), which concluded that Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal will leave the UK £70bn worse off over the next decade compared with remaining in the EU, reducing the size of the British economy by 4% by the end of the 2020s.


Making the mistake of then clicking on the comments box, listed


after the BBC’s report on the study, led me into the ultimate yes/no, brilliant/rubbish, don’t know/don’t care, set of responses that have come to represent public debate since the referendum vote was declared in distant 2016. Thankfully, at that point in my day, a Nutreco press release popped


into my email inbox, announcing that the Dutch company had just signed an agreement to buy Cargill’s compound feed business in Portugal. “Subject to approval from the Portuguese authorities,” the release


went on, “the transaction is expected to be completed in three to five months.”


Three to five months! What must that be like? According to the release footnote, Nutreco already employs over


12,000 people in 37 countries with net sales of €6.4 billion in 2018. In addition, its two global brands Skretting (aquafeed) and Trouw Nutrition (animal nutrition) have sales in over 90 countries. Portugal is clearly the next step forward. Cargill, meanwhile, employs 160,000 people worldwide to supply customers and communities in 70 countries and regions. Both companies said how happy they were with their agreement


and how much they were looking forward to a profitable future, or words to that effect. Isn’t life simple when those representing the two sides of an issue


decide to talk, negotiate and agree a deal that works for both of them. There again, in the Nutreco/Cargill case, the negotiators are accountable to their employers and will face the sack if they get it wrong. On second thoughts, therefore, here’s to a happy and influential


December 12. PAGE 16 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 FEED COMPOUNDER


Antibiotics – progress and disappointment One warning none of us can afford to ignore is that unless we keep striving to correct the global misuse of antibiotics, around 10 million people will die in 2050 as a result of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). According to the high-profile AMR-based O’Neill report, published in


2016 (that date again), at least 700,000 people are already dying every year from drug-resistant diseases. That’s despite the banning of antibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) in Europe some 13 years ago, ending their previous blanket use in relation to improving weight gain, boosting feed conversion rates and controlling diseases. Since then, and quite a bit before in reality, the feed industry has


played a major part in providing farmers with effective alternatives to AGPs, funding feed supplement research and new product developments, to enable producers to continue achieving high level results without the health risks of the past. Maintaining progress in such areas of research and development


is never easy, of course, especially with the recent memory of how simple it used to be to achieve the same, or similar, growth and feed efficiency results. It was encouraging to read a three-year update of the O’Neill report,


therefore, released in early October. Complied by Charles Clift, senior consulting fellow at Chatham House’s Centre on Global Health Security, the first part of the report’s conclusion made the feed-based changes of the past decade and a bit seem hugely worthwhile. “There have been significant advances in reducing antibiotic use in


agriculture, particularly in high-income countries,” wrote Clift. Unfortunately, he then added that there is still ‘a long way to


go’ to secure the same progress in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Quoting the latest World Health Organisation analysis, the update


revealed that 123 countries (80% of those sampled) have policies in place to regulate the sale of antimicrobials, including the requirement of a prescription for human use. In low-income countries, however, only 53% of nations have such policies in place. It was also concluded that in relation to agriculture, regulatory


procedures in LMICs continue to be ‘much weaker’. The fact is that only just over half of ‘reporting LMICs’ have laws or


regulations in place regarding AGPs, with an even smaller proportion actually regulating the use of antibiotics for growth promotion. As such, commented Clift, it remains ‘difficult to convince farmers to


have a veterinarian involved in antibiotic use when they can walk down the street to a pharmacy and buy antibiotics for their personal use’. Moving deeper into the 54-page update, the point is also made


that the big gains from banning AGPs in farm livestock production were always going to be most sharply focused on lower-income countries with less-developed hygiene and production practices. In contrast, banning AGPs in high-income countries, while obviously important, has had a somewhat ‘limited’ impact in global terms. The update report also highlights the fact that some of the world’s


‘less-regulated environments’ are starting to move towards the use of more intensive farming methods than in the past. That can only serve to exacerbate the AGP problem, as it exists in LMICs. One recent study, in fact, has projected that global antimicrobial consumption in agriculture will rise by 67% by 2030 and that it will nearly


Comment section is sponsored by Compound Feed Engineering Ltd www.cfegroup.com


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