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EDITORIAL FRIdAY, MAY 18, 2018 4 Acting Editor & Publisher : Jobaer Alam Telephone: +8802-9104683-84, Fax: 9127103 e-mail: editor@thebangladeshtoday.com Friday, May 18, 2018 Colossal loss and stresses from traffic jams Traffic congestion in Dhaka eats up around 5 million working hours every day and the average speed of vehicles during rush hours has come down to 5kmph, according to the Accident Research Institute (ARI) of Buet. The congestion causes an annual loss of between Tk 20,000 crore and Tk 55,000 crore, says ARI, citing findings of organisations working on the issue."However, about 50 to 70 percent of the losses can be avoided through proper actions," ARI Director Prof Moazzem Hossain told a roundtable two months ago."Sixty percent of Tk 37,000 crore [half way between Tk 20,000 crore and Tk 55,000 crore] can be saved by those actions," he said, In July last year, a World Bank analysis had said in the last 10 years, average traffic speed in Dhaka dropped from 21kmph (kilometres per hour) to 7kmph, which was slightly above the average walking speed.The speed may drop to 4kmph by 2035, slower than the walking speed, it added."Congestion in Dhaka eats up 3.2 million work hours per day. This cost the economy billions of dollars every year," said the analysis. Dhaka, a city of over 15 million and Bangladesh's biggest city in terms of population, is noted to be a specially long suffering one by its residents for the traffic jams they always face on its roads. Thus, it was hoped that the present government with its pledged enthusiastic approach to many issues of major public interest, would move with particular speed and effectiveness to address this long lingering issue of traffic jams that take a huge and regular toll from stressed nerves and health, costlier operations of transports and other forms of losses. But the traffic scene in this city has been turning only worse and people are desperate for a deliverance. According to reports, progressively traffic movement conditions in the city have been turning worse and worse. In many places and most of the time, traffic gets held up motionlessly for more than half an hour or so without any plausible explanation for the same. Thus, a destination to be arrived at in twenty minutes needs at least one and half hours or more to be reached. The horrendous traffic jams are creating great hardships. Many people are known to be falling ill as a result. If the traffic situation is so bad, how severely it would stress them during the coming Ramadan month when their coping strengths would be understandably at a lower level from fasting, the sufferers wonder. Traffic department officials on being asked say many things ranging from inadequate roads in the city and the absence of a sufficient number of infrastructures such as flyovers and expressways. But only more devoted traffic management by traffic policemen or their doing their job with enthusiasm and care, can much alleviate the traffic related agonies suffered by the city's residents. As it is, the traffic policemen are seen doing a very sloppy job specially at intersections with their hand signalling althoughsignalling lights were set up for doing this work at great costs. But media reports say that most of these lights are out of order. Why the lights should be inoperative and whose responsibility is it to operate them in support of easing traffic jams ? Traffic policemen hold up traffic for unreasonably long periods of time with their manual signalling that lead to long queus of transports forming and creating jams. Proper use of the automatic signalling lights can much reduce this malaise and speed up traffic movement. Then the policemen also do nothing to buses stopping not at bus stops but arbitrarily anywhere on the roads to allow passangers to embark or disembark. But this practice holds up other vehicles on the rear creating jams. Real estate developers and others keep construction materials heaped up on roads but nobody obliges them to keep the roads free and clean from such encroachments. Traffic policemen turn a blind eye to rickshawpullers not moving in a single file or in lanes on roads earmarked for them but in a most carefree manner. The rickshaws, thus, get in front of engine driven vehicles and create tangles that force the latter to slow down and add to the jams. Transports are also allowed to be parked similarly carelessly that lead to constricting of roads spaces hindering easier traffic movement. The roads are in tatters in many places. Traffic movement over these crumbled or pot-holed roads automatically become too slow. Only repairing them can quicken traffic movement. According to experts, only introducing one way movement in some sections such as in the Rampura road will very significantly add to ease of movement between the central and relatively newer parts of the city. All of the above reasons and more for traffic jams do not call for building costly infrastructures . Just more caring and efficient traffic policing can mean so much of a difference for the better in traffic movement in the city. Italy's populists have earned their shot Two and a half months after an extraordinary general election, Italy is finally on the brink of getting a new government. The Five Star Movement and the League look set to form an anti-establishment coalition, which would strain Italy's fragile public finances and inflame tensions between Rome and its Eurozone allies. The two populist parties still have to finalise their programme and pick a prime minister who would suit them both. Most important, they will need to win around Italian President Sergio Mattarella, who has signalled that he wants to play an active role in the formation of a government. But provided Five Star and the League can reconcile their differences, they should just be allowed to get on and rule. The populists have a democratic mandate, so it's time their ideas are finally put to the test - whether you agree with them or not. Ahead of the March election, the League and Five Star ran separately on two platforms full of generous giveaways. In their coalition talks, which started last week after a long stalemate, they could have watered down those promises to try to calm the anxiety of Italy's European partners. Tellingly, they appear to be planning to just add them together. FERdInAndo GIUGLIAno The agreement, which is not yet concluded, looks set to include: a dramatic lowering of the retirement age; a steep cut in income tax; and a generous income support scheme for the unemployed and low-paid. There's no detail on how this anti-elite dream team would pay for such lavish pledges. Italy's president and the rest of the Eurozone are obviously looking on with alarm. According to the currency union's fiscal rules, countries should be using the current economic upswing to cut the deficit, not increase it. Italy's public debt - standing at more than 130 per cent of national income - is a time bomb that's been defused temporarily thanks to the European Central Bank's quantitative easing (QE). Once the ECB calls time on QE, AndREW hAMMond most probably in the autumn, investors will naturally question how sustainable this debt pile is. Nevertheless, a League/Five Star coalition would represent what Italians want currently. The two parties won more than half the seats, thanks to agendas that were indifferent to budget constraints and critical of EU economic management. If they can strike a deal, so be it. The president and the Eurozone have tools for keeping a new populist government in check. Italy has signed up to a long list of European treaties, which severely constrain the economic policy of single currency members. The country's constitution refers to the need to balance the budget over the economic cycle. The president has the right to veto any law that does not comply. The president and the Eurozone have tools for keeping a new populist government in check. Italy has signed up to a long list of European treaties, which severely constrain the economic policy of single currency members. The country's constitution refers to the need to balance the budget over the economic cycle. The president has the right to veto any law that does not comply. Of course, the new coalition has the option of leaving the Eurozone, if it wished. Both parties have toyed with the idea. But they've abandoned it for now because of the market panic that would ensue. They could try to change the constitution, but that's a tortuous process requiring a big majority or referendum. Absent that, they will have to balance their promises with the rules Italy has chosen to abide by. The two parties will also find that governing together is much harder than campaigning alone. For years, the Five Star Movement has campaigned on a platform vague enough to attract support from left and right. It now risks alienating liberal supporters by forming an alliance with the League, an anti-immigrant party that admires Hungary's Viktor Orban. The parliamentary arithmetic is difficult too. In the senate, the two parties have only a wafer-thin majority, which will demand extraordinary discipline. So let the League and Five Star set sail, if they wish. It's time they show us how they fare far away from the comfort of electoral pledges. Source: Gulf news Europe edgy over Italian populist government fears Italy appears on the verge of forming a radical, populist government some two months after March's election stalemate. The emergence of a potentially anti-establishment, Euroskeptic coalition formed from the Five Star Movement and the far-right League is causing significant concern in Brussels and other European capitals because Italy poses perhaps the biggest threat to the eurozone's future. The anticipated administration in this key G7 nation, which has the third largest eurozone economy, comes after March's ballot saw no single party or wider bloc win an overall majority in parliament. The headlines were captured by the populist Five Star Movement, an anti-establishment group founded less than a decade ago by comic Beppe Grillo and now led by 31-year-old Luigo Di Maio, which capitalized on a rancorous campaign that was dominated by immigration and the country's economic woes. After weeks of torturous negotiations, Five Star - whose biggest previous political wins had been in mayoral elections in key cities like Rome and Turin - appears set to renege on a previous pledge not to enter into a coalition with another party. Ultimately, it looks likely to take a leap of faith to align with the League, with which it has key policy similarities, after the two collectively gained more than half the votes in the election. Presuming a deal is agreed, it would need to be approved by the memberships of both parties. This injects further political uncertainty into the picture. The wages of disinformation IT struck me as oddly profound when, as a child, I first learned that aphorism that all schoolchildren are taught at some point in their education: a little learning is a dangerous thing. The paradoxical nature of the formulation was arresting to me as a child, because we had all along been taught that learning is something good. The fact that learning has its dangers was a new thought altogether. With the passage of time, I have repeatedly seen with my own eyes how true this aphorism is. Too often we meet people in our journey through life whose minds have been poisoned, or otherwise incapacitated, with a small kernel of knowledge that their meagre mental endowment is unable to digest. With the spread of the internet, small kernels of information now parade as knowledge, and those without the ability to put these kernels in their proper context often suffer the most debilitating forms of cognitive indigestion. In the language of social media, these people are referred to as 'trolls'. In older times, trolls were creatures who dwelt in caves and were stripped of all forms of empathy or self-awareness. They were depicted as ugly beings, vengeful and consumed with hate. They could not be reasoned with, nor could their minds be changed with any presentation of the facts, because their minds were governed more by emotion than reason. When trolls come into power, they have a built-in interest in keeping the population armed only with a little learning. The potential Five Star-League coalition represents a worst-case scenario for Brussels. This is especially so given the poorer showing of the two main pro-European forces that have dominated Italian politics for decades: The right of center Forza Italia and the center-left Democratic Party. The country has the second biggest debt load in the European single currency area at over 130 percent of GDP, and its banking sector is under significant stress with massive underperforming loans. The fear is not just the expected political stripe of the coalition, but also that it may well be weak and unstable, raising the prospect of political paralysis. A key initial task of the anticipated administration will be securing the passage of a 2019 budget, where Five Star and the League want to see tens of billions of euros of new spending. Key domestic policy priorities include the possibility of cutting taxes in the form of a new flat tax, and introducing a universal basic income. But most international eyes will be on policy toward fellow European countries and the EU, which is expected to be troublesome. The League's leader Matteo Salvini has With the rapid proliferation of information, the boundary being facts, information, knowledge and wisdom have now been so thoroughly obliterated that anything can be packaged and served up to the mob and there will be at least some takers. Ridiculous things can now set large wheels into motion, because disinformation at the service of factional politics means there need not be any grounding to what one is saying any longer. Just so long as it vibes with somebody's idea of how things ought to be. This would still be fine were it not for the enormous damage it can do to the collective life of a society. A recent example from India provides an example. Two years ago, a bridge collapsed in Kolkata, Bengal. More than 50 people died and many more were injured in that terrible accident. Shortly after, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, showed up at a political rally and loudly proclaimed that the bridge collapse was divine wrath (Bengal was governed by the All India Trinamool KhURRAM hUSAIn attacked perceived "unacceptable interference" by Brussels in the Italian coalition negotiations since March, while Di Maio has referred to "continuous attack… from Eurocrats" and it is clear that both will push Brussels to rethink the stability and growth pact that keeps budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP. Italy's inconclusive election looks to have been the midwife for a radical, populist coalition that could shake up Europe. Salvini has previously asserted that At the same time as tensions between Rome and Brussels could grow significantly, the League and Five Star have also sought a re-evaluation of the relationship between Italy and Russia. This includes calling for the lifting of EU sanctions against Moscow. he wishes Italy to leave the EU, while Five Star has become more pragmatic in its Euroskepticism over time; asserting the country should reconsider its role in the EU and have a referendum on whether it should keep the euro single currency. Another flashpoint in Brussels-Rome relations could come over immigration. Both Five Star and the League regard current levels of inward migration to the country as "unsustainable for Italy," especially in the context of current high unemployment in the country. Tensions are therefore likely to be high not just between Italy and Brussels, but also other key European powers like Germany and France, Congress party at the time, with whom the BJP had clashed violently in the panchayat elections). Now suddenly a bridge collapsed in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the BJP's Yogi Adityanath, hatemonger par excellence. So ground elements in the Indian media now wish to know: whose wrath is this tragedy owed to? This is only the most recent example of such absurdities that are increasingly dominating political life of many countries. When the collective life comes unhinged from any anchor in reality, the door is opened to the theatre of the When trolls come into power, they have a built-in interest in keeping the population armed only with a little learning. That way people's emotions can be activated easily for purposes of factional politics. Reality can be buried easily beneath layers and layers of slogans that are perceived by those chanting them to be facts. absurd. Anything anyone says can fuel the political engine, provided that the someone in question has the means to get his or her word out, and the word in question provides the right grist for the right mills that are currently in motion. When trolls come into power, they have a built-in interest in keeping the population armed only with a little learning. That way people's emotions can be activated easily for purposes of factional politics. Reality can be buried which have traditionally been the twin motors of EU integration. There is little obvious appetite in any of these power centers to change rules, or grant exemptions to countries, on migration or debt. At the same time as tensions between Rome and Brussels could grow significantly, the League and Five Star have also sought a re-evaluation of the relationship between Italy and Russia. This includes calling for the lifting of EU sanctions against Moscow. With such renewed political angst in a nation where there has been more than 60 national governments in the post-war era, concerns are growing again about the country's future. There remains significant public angst over corruption, the nation's migration crisis, and the continuing fragility of the economy, with double-digit unemployment and low growth. Indeed, only Greece has fared worse in the eurozone in the last 20 years, which has fueled the political success of Five Star and the League. Part of the reason for March's inconclusive election outcome was the introduction of a new voting system that is two-thirds proportional representation and one-third firstpast-the-post, making it harder for any single party (especially the antiestablishment Five Star with its growing popularity) to win an outright majority. The threshold for any single party to have a working majority is now around 40 percent of the vote, which no party has come close to securing. Source: Arab News easily beneath layers and layers of slogans that are perceived by those chanting them to be facts. Legal categories or economic data can be used like epithets. Look at how our political space is dominated by allegations of people calling each other 'traitor' or 'blasphemer' or 'looter' for example. Those casually hurling these allegations should look up how the Constitution actually defines treason, and reflect on the fate of those who have, in reality, committed treason. But they won't because reality is a nuisance in the era of trolls. The blurring of the boundary between reality and an emotive perception of it carries grave risks for social stability. Today we have a movement proclaiming that growing numbers of people are being picked up for unknown reasons, only to be labelled as 'terrorists' and treated accordingly. They have to shout to be heard above the din. The scale of the misrepresentation, the awful smear campaign against this movement, borrows heavily from the tools with which reality is chopped up and manufactured. A single line uttered by someone at a rally, a pictorial meme, is usually enough for many people to stamp the whole enterprise with the label of 'traitor', and dismiss their claims and demands. Of course that does not solve the problem. It only postpones its settlement for another day, in another form. Source: Dawn
DEVELOPMENT TueSDay, May 22, 2018 9 Colombian success story of uniting young people Steven Grattan A rat skitters through the prison cell where Harold Cuesta sits handcuffed, beads of sweat dripping down his brow. He says his imprisonment means the delicate peace pact that his gang and others negotiated with the mayor of Quibdó is now dead. Since April, Cuesta, a key figure in the peace talks, has languished in the deprived Colombian city's overpopulated Anayancy prison, alongside a dozen other ex-gang leaders. Cuesta's list of convictions over the years is exhaustive, a catalogue of time in and out of prison for offences including extortion and, this time around, the alleged murder of his former lawyer. Yet it wasn't always this way. Cuesta was once on track to realising his dream of becoming a professional footballer, until life took a turn for the worse and he resorted to criminal activity to make a living. "The peace process has no future here," reflects the 29-year-old, under the watchful gaze of the guards. The problem is not unusual in Colombia, where the Bogotá government has struggled to enforce a national peace accord in parts of the country where it holds little sway. Quibdó, however, has previously bucked that trend. The city, where the authorities struggle to provide basic services, has long felt abandoned by the state. Its predominantly black population sought to deal with their own safety. The pact over Quibdó's street warfare once distinguished it from other Colombian cities, riddled with violence and poverty. Now they find their reconciliation process threatened by the same question rocking Colombia as a whole: how should gang members who agree to turn in their arms account for their crimes? The Quibdó pact, signed in September, was an attempt to lower the crime rate before Chocó's famous San Pacho festival. The gangs agreed Quibdó's Reposo 3 barrio, built to provide temporary accommodation for people forced to flee their homes, has become a permanent installation. to lay down their weapons in exchange for the promise of access to education and work opportunities. Murder rates and vandalism dropped dramatically. "There is one simple problem," says Quibdó's mayor, Isaias Chalá. "These kinds of processes usually start from the top and work their way down … from the presidency down. But we started it the other way round." In April, the Colombian vice president, Óscar Naranjo, travelled to the region, applauding the pact for its success. Three days later, without warning, came the arrests. Chalá claims the order to jail Cuesta and the A former slave-trading hub on the Pacific coast, Chocó remains one of Colombia's most impoverished and marginalised regions. "Chocó is a region that has been marginalised, stigmatised and abandoned by the government, since the time of postcolonisation," says Edwar Calderón, a Colombian academic at the University of Edinburgh. Since the signing of Colombia's peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in late 2016, a power vacuum has been created in areas where the guerillas demobilised, allowing criminal armed other gang leaders came from the groups to expand. "What has national police, "as a restorative justice process needs to be carried out". happened with the Farc leaving these areas are territories without control. Photo: Nadege Mazars What we are seeing now is the same violence as before, sometimes even worse, but without control," says Calderón. Amid the renewed violence, he wanted to try find a way to stop young people from joining gangs. Calderón hit upon the idea of using funds from an academic project to create a workshop involving Colombian artists and musicians. With the help of Mr Klaje, a Colombian music group who create instruments from recycled materials, and a group of artists from Fundación Casa Tres Patios in Medellín, a weeklong workshop was held in late April. Tatiana Gamboa, a 29-year-old mother from the impoverished Obrero neighbourhood, took part. "It's important, because all of the people who are here have had some kind of issue with one another," she says. Another participant, Luis Romaña, 26, talks about displacement in his hometown. "Quibdó has seen a big increase in population over the last decade, a lot of it due to the arrival of displaced people as a result of the armed conflict. The population began to grow, there was no control over this, and we lost security in the city. "There are some neighbourhoods that are like colonies of other municipalities. For example, there are neighbourhoods here filled with people solely from Bojayá, where the massacre took place in 2002 [about 100 people were killed when a rebel mortar aimed at paramilitaries fell on a church full of refugees]. There are also people from Bayudo, where a big indigenous population was displaced," he says. On the final day of the workshop, young people from a variety of backgrounds, and from rival neighbourhoods, took part in a parade. Old buckets and paint tins were transformed into drums and carnival costumes crafted from sequins and feathers as the participants called for an end to violence in the city. Yeiner Belalcázar Paz, 40, better known as Candyman, is a teacher and the frontman of Mr Klaje. He comes from a neighbourhood in the Colombian city of Cali, where he grew up surrounded by gang crime. "We believe that art has a power that can help with the kind of processes that are happening like the one in Quibdó. It is like a magic tool. The young people here like to dance and sing. They live through art. When they hear a drum it runs through their veins." Among those taking part was a group of about 15 young people from Reposo 3, a neighbourhood taxi drivers wont go near. One was Baeron Palomeque. "We don't have a football pitch, a community centre or anywhere to carry out recreational activities, so the dance group is the only thing we have," he says. "It is helping to keep a lot of these kids off the street and has brought young people from rival neighbourhoods together. The government must do more though. "If there is no investment in youth, it is going to be very difficult [to end violence] because the solution is not just to arrest people or put more armed forces on the streets, but to create opportunity." Many of the workshop attendees told of their childhood in the Chocó region. Rosney Mosquera, 29, has just finished her high school diploma. "I've been a victim throughout my life. A victim of displacement, moving from neighbourhood to neighbourhood all my life. I'm a victim of rape and of armed conflict. "There is a lot of violence in the neighbourhood where I live. People have always been fighting and killing one another." The organisers were pleased with the outcome of the event. "When the young people realised that they could work together, they started to integrate, and when this happened they said that they didn't know why they thought about people from other neighbourhoods the way they did before," says Candyman. "There were a few young indigenous people there, and the black population of Quibdó. Both usually kept to their own groups. But when we started to do the activities, they started to come together." On the final day, as the parade made its way through the puddle-laden streets of the city, onlookers peered from balconies, tapping their feet to the infectious rhythms and listening to the young people as they chanted: "Our neighbourhood is your neighbourhood, our street is your street. No more violence, Quibdó." At one point they went past the prison where Cuesta is being held, reflecting on the ruined pact he built. Why development needs social science Less meat consumption linked to cutting drug resistance David Bennett Different media sources and commentators provide very good coverage on a wide range of development issues - but it is striking how little attention they give to the social sciences. A recent editorial, for example, appears to mean the natural sciences when setting out arguments for focusing aid on science funding based on the UN's Financing for Development conference in Ethiopia in 2015. Yet the social and political sciences have much to offer in providing powerful insights for promoting development. And in fact, the division between the natural and social sciences only emerged in the mid-19th century. My own career straddles the divide and most recently has focused on biotechnology's increasing role in developing countries, particularly in Africa, where - like in other economically emerging and increasingly influential regions - the social sciences are the poor relation. This neglect of the social sciences is part of a larger challenge: that of producing research that addresses development priorities such as food, health and energy security, rather than simply meeting academic objectives such as conference presentations and publication in peer-reviewed journals. Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president, criticised the African education system for its "limited relevance" to the continent's social and economic challenges when delivering a keynote address at the start of the inaugural Africa Universities Summit in Johannesburg in July. This has roots in the history of African education. There are some 620 African universities now, yet until the 1970s, many were extensions of British and French universities. Their curricula and research were dominated by Western paradigms, concepts and theories. As Mbeki said in his speech, this dominance still continues in the social sciences. Marxist, neoliberal and gender studies derived from Western thinking and research prevail over local thinking and research. So social scientists generally avoid topics deemed unfashionable, politically incorrect or too sensitive in the local context. Those topics include large rural populations, widespread relative poverty, massive young population growth and governance involving extremist violence, tribalism and corruption - but there are many others. The result is that African social sciences are of questionable relevance to local conditions. And this is part of a wider problem in the higher education system. As Mbeki said, the relationship between universities and political leaders has been "weakened and destroyed in many instances" since colonial times, partly because universities are perceived to be part of the political opposition. This has led to African universities becoming "impoverished", "weakened" Social and political science can offer powerful insights for regional development. Photo: Tom Pilston and "marginalised", in the words of Mbeki again. This means they are starved of funds, being regarded as a drain on public finances rather than potential contributors to countries' economies, and their findings and recommendations are frequently ignored, rejected or even opposed. So when they are able to, bright students go abroad for their postgraduate training, as they used to, but no longer return enthusiastically to contribute their knowledge - depriving the continent of a new generation of natural and social scientists. Instead, many join an ever-growing diaspora. If they do return, they frequently face poorly resourced and managed facilities with little opportunity to participate in the work of their international academic communities, or to advance their careers. This resource deficit feeds into the disconnect between social science research and African development, which has to be rectified if that research is to have local relevance, be accepted and supported by political leaders, and therefore play its full part in informing development. The reason is self-evident. African history and its societies, like those of other non-Western regions, differ radically from those of the West - and so must the social sciences, which are concerned with societies and the relationships among individuals within societies. There are organisations working towards this goal. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), an independent organisation set up in 1973, aims to bring together and promote the social science community on the continent. CODESRIA cohosted the World Social Science Forum a few years ago in South Africa. Its title was "Transforming global relations for a just world", yet it focused on tackling global inequalities - a theme that's in line with dominating Western paradigms - rather than Africa's development needs. Mike van Graan, executive director of the African Arts Institute, said of his focus at the forum: "We are trying to understand the cultural dimensions of development. How do you pursue development and how do you understand development, both itself as a cultural construct, but also in the context of societies where culture is an important player?" This is precisely the question that needs answering. But it was asked in relation to solving inequality, not addressing the many components of development. Dyna Rochmyaningsih Cutting meat consumption is one of three strategies that an international team of scientists recommends to tackle the rising problem of antibiotic resistance stemming from abundant use in animal farming. In a study published in the journal Science in September, the scientists also recommend caps on antibiotic use and levying user fees on buyers of farm antibiotics which would effectively make it more expensive and discourage excessive use. About 80 per cent of all antibiotics are consumed by farm animals. Farmers resort to antibiotics, generally administered through animal feed or lowdose injections, to improve nutrition and hygiene for their livestock. However, the drugs turn farm animals into major sources of antibiotic resistance, according to the study. In September 2016, the UN General Assembly highlighted the urgency of limiting antibiotic use in animal farms which is the leading cause of drug resistance. The global consumption of antibiotics by food animals, estimated at 131,109 tonnes in 2013, is projected to reach 200,235 tonnes by 2030. According to Ramanan Laxminarayan, an author of the study and director of the Centre for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy, Washington, while some countries are already making efforts to decrease the use of antibiotics on animal farms, the results are yet to be assessed. China, the largest consumer of farm antibiotics, has advised its citizens to cut meat consumption to 40 - 70 grams per person per day or about half of the current consumption. For comparison, the United States consume a very high 260 grams of meat per person per day. Europe has enforced capping regulations and the World Bank has proposed a 'user fee' to be imposed on those buying antibiotics for farm Cutting intake of farmed meats could help reduce antibiotic resistance. animals. According to the study, limiting per capita meat intake to 40 grams/person/day could result in reduction of antimicrobial use in animal farms by 66 per cent, while enforcing caps on antibiotic usage could result in a 64 per cent reduction. The user-fee strategy could also decrease antibiotic use by 30 per cent. "We find that a combination of these three strategies could decrease the use of antimicrobials in animal farms by 80 per cent," says Laxminarayan. "I think that inertia is our biggest challenge - maybe people will adopt these strategies when things get really worse." Riana Arief, director, Centre for Indonesian Veterinary Analytical Studies, points to the Indonesian agriculture ministry's recent regulation prohibiting the use of Photo: NDTV antibiotics as feed additives. "Controlling antibiotic use is possible through regulation, strong enforcement and good surveillance," she says. Arief, however, thinks that limiting meat consumption and user-fee strategies may not work in countries with very low per capita meat consumption like Indonesia. Meat consumption in the country is still far below global standards and government policy is to boost meat production. Also, smallholders who rely on costly imported feed will be hit if a user fee is imposed, she says.
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