In India, animal farming is often presented as the main cause of the development of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) in the environment. On top of being one of the pillars of global pharmaceutical production, India is also a major provider of food animals at the global scale. The importance of pharmaceutical manufacturing and the large scale of animal farming have turned the presence of antibiotic residues and resistant genes in the environment into a worrying phenomenon. In this paper, our team focuses on the shrimp industry in Tamil Nadu. Beyond AMR, shrimp cultivation has also been implicated in ecological degradation and the dispossession of local farmers, and has produced a landscape that visually invokes quite literal ruination. Due to the saline water that is piped in to fill shrimp ponds, soil salinity levels are often so high as to not only preclude any other farming activity, but also to kill trees and other remaining plant life. Multiple struggles have emerged in Tamil Nadu around this ruination and led to new legislation on coastal aquaculture and AMR in August 2023. This paper will focus on this new legal development and the controversies around it in Tamil Nadu, India.
Dahdah et al. (Fri,) studied this question.