Pharmaceuticalised livelihoods: antibiotics and the rise of ‘Quick Farming’ in peri-urban Uganda

Abstract

AbstractThe ‘livestock revolution’ has seen the lives and livelihoods of peri-urban peoples increasingly intertwine with pigs and poultry across Africa in response to a rising demand for meat protein. This ‘revolution’ heralds the potential to address both poverty and nutritional needs. However, the intensification of farming has sparked concern, including for antibiotic misuse and its consequences for antimicrobial resistance (AMR). These changes reflect a micro-biopolitical conundrum where the agendas of microbes, farmers, publics, authorities and transnational agencies are in tension. To understand this requires close attention to the practices, principles and potentials held between these actors. Ethnographic research took place in a peri-urban district, Wakiso, in Uganda between May 2018 and March 2021. This included a medicine survey at 115 small- and medium-scale pig and poultry farms, 18 weeks of participant observation at six farms, 34 in-depth interviews with farmers and others in the local livestock sector, four group discussions with 38 farmers and 7 veterinary officers, and analysis of archival, media and policy documents. Wide-scale adoption of quick farming was found, an entrepreneurial phenomenon that sees Ugandans raising ‘exotic’ livestock with imported methods and measures for production, including antibiotics for immediate therapy, prevention of infections and to promote production and protection of livelihoods. This assemblage – a promissory assemblage of the peri-urban – reinforced precarity against which antibiotics formed a potential layer of protection. The paper argues that to address antibiotic use as a driver of AMR is to address precarity as a driver of antibiotic use. Reduced reliance on antibiotics required a level of biosecurity and economies of scale in purchasing insurance that appeared affordable only by larger-scale commercial producers. This study illustrates the risks – to finances, development and health – of expanding an entrepreneurial model of protein production in populations vulnerable to climate, infection and market dynamics.