The Antibiotic Crisis Exposes a Debate Brazil Avoids: The Living Conditions of the Animals That Sustain Its Protein Industry
The European suspension of Brazilian imports should trigger a debate that goes far beyond trade: what kind of lives are we providing for the animals that sustain one of the country’s largest industries?
Pigs can transmit antibiotic-resistant superbugs to humans
Photo: INA FASSBENDER / AFP
Brazil is discussing the European Union’s suspension of Brazilian meat imports primarily as a trade issue. The conversation focuses on barriers, exports, economic losses, competitiveness, and the need to regain access to one of the world’s most demanding markets.
But there is a question that is barely being asked: what happens to animals before their meat reaches that market?
Because before becoming a commodity, an export, revenue, or a trade statistic, there is an animal born into a system designed to produce as much as possible. An animal that may be subjected to confinement, high stocking densities, transportation, stress, disease, painful procedures, and medical interventions. An animal whose life, from beginning to end, is shaped by an economic equation.
European Union has suspended imports of Brazilian meat over a lack of guarantees that Brazil complies with European rules on antimicrobial use.
It is a sanitary decision. But it should trigger a much broader discussion about how animals are raised in Brazil.
The antibiotic is not the problem. But it may be a symptom.
Let’s start with the obvious: antibiotics and other antimicrobials have a legitimate and essential role in veterinary medicine. Sick animals need to be treated.
The problem arises when medicines stop being merely a therapeutic tool and become part of the production system itself.
The World Health Organization recommends a global reduction in antibiotic use in food-producing animals and emphasizes that measures such as improved hygiene, vaccination, and disease prevention should be used to reduce the risk of infections and, consequently, the need for antimicrobials.
This is therefore not merely a commercial issue. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest global threats to public health.
According to the WHO, antimicrobial resistance was associated with nearly 5 million deaths worldwide in 2019. The organization also advocates reducing antimicrobial use in agrifood systems and promoting prudent, evidence-based use in animal health.
Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture itself recognizes that responsible antimicrobial use is important both for animal health and welfare and for containing antimicrobial resistance.
So why does a production system need to rely on so many mechanisms of control after an animal has already become sick, instead of first investing in conditions that help keep animals healthy?
What Pigs in Focus has already been showing
Long before antimicrobial use became a barrier to Brazilian products entering the European market, it was already being monitored as an animal welfare and One Health issue.
Pigs in Focus — Monitor of the Brazilian Pork Industry, published annually by Sinergia Animal, evaluates what major companies in the sector are doing — and committing to do — to improve animals’ living conditions.
In its 2025 edition, non-therapeutic antimicrobial use was analyzed across three different practices: growth promotion, prophylactic use, and metaphylactic use. The methodology considered that these practices should be eliminated in order to encourage medicines to be used exclusively to treat sick animals.
The results are revealing.
Regarding the use of antimicrobials as growth promoters, only six of the 16 companies assessed — Ecofrigo, MBRF, JBS, Pamplona, Alibem, and Master — had policies considered adequate to eliminate this practice. The other ten had not yet published commitments to do so.
When it comes to prophylactic use, the picture is even more restrictive: only Ecofrigo had publicly committed to banning the practice by 2027. MBRF, JBS, Pamplona, Alibem, Master, Aurora, Frimesa, Pif Paf, Coopavel, Ceratti, Frivatti, Nutribras, Palmali, and Gran Corte had not yet published commitments to eliminate it.
The situation was similar for metaphylactic use: only Ecofrigo had publicly committed to banning it by the end of 2027. Minerva mentioned a commitment, but it covered only 80% of its supplier network and had a deadline extending to 2040 — conditions that meant it did not receive a score for this criterion.
In other words, among the 16 companies assessed by Pigs in Focus in 2025, only one had made public commitments considered adequate by the methodology to eliminate all three non-therapeutic uses of antimicrobials.
This is a snapshot of how the Brazilian industry is still dealing with the issue.
The problem does not start with the antibiotic
When an animal receives medication, we are looking at the end of a chain of events.
Before that comes the environment in which the animal lives. Stocking density. Available space. Handling. Stress levels. The ability to express natural behaviors. Exposure to disease. And the system’s ability to prevent health problems without systematically relying on medication.
Pigs in Focus starts from precisely this broader perspective.
In its 2025 edition, the report began separating the three different forms of non-therapeutic antimicrobial use and recognized that they should be assessed individually. The logic is clear: it is not enough to ask whether a company “uses antibiotics.” We need to know why they are used, under what circumstances, and whether there are concrete commitments to eliminate uses that are not therapeutic.
The methodology to be used in Pigs in Focus 2026 goes even further.
Instead of looking only at commitments, the new methodology distinguishes between current implementation and public commitments.
The message is simple: It is not enough to say that things have changed. Companies must be able to demonstrate that they have changed.
This methodological shift is particularly important at this moment. Because the issue now at the center of international trade is precisely one of guarantees, evidence, and the ability to demonstrate that rules are being followed.
What the European Union is putting forward as a sanitary requirement therefore has a parallel in a discussion that civil society has already been having with Brazilian companies: What is the company’s antimicrobial-use policy? What has actually been eliminated? What practices are still in place? How broad is the commitment? And what evidence exists to demonstrate that it is being implemented?
The animal has become a unit of production
At its core, this is a discussion about how animals are raised. The industrial animal production model was built around a promise: produce more, faster, and at a lower cost. More meat, more eggs, more milk, more animals per unit of space, more efficiency across the supply chain.
When an animal is turned into a production unit, its ability to move, rest, explore its environment, express natural behaviors, and live free from pain and suffering can start being evaluated through a very different question: How much does this cost the production system?
This is where animal welfare stops being a peripheral issue.
Because animals are sentient beings. They feel pain, fear, and stress. They adapt, suffer, and respond to the conditions in which they are kept.
And yet much of the industry continues to treat these needs as secondary variables when weighed against productivity.
How much suffering are we willing to accept as a “cost” of producing meat at scale?
Brazil has known this logic for decades
Perhaps the clearest example is far from farms and slaughterhouses. It is at sea.
The export of live animals is one of the most explicit expressions of a system that turns animals into commodities. Instead of transporting refrigerated meat, Brazil ships the animals themselves and turns them into cargo.
In 2024, more than 1 million live cattle were exported from Brazil, according to data reported from foreign trade records. And data obtained through Brazil’s Access to Information Law show that, between January 2020 and March 2025, more than 2,300 cattle died during maritime transportation. There were 393 voyages, 306 of which recorded deaths — approximately 78% of all crossings.
On a voyage by the vessel Nada in 2024, 108 animals died during a journey of approximately one week, with nearly 23,000 cattle on board.
And this did not start recently.
On October 6, 2015, the vessel Haidar sank in Pará state with nearly 5,000 live cattle on board. The animals died, and the accident also caused the release of approximately 700,000 liters of oily waste, becoming one of the region’s largest socio-environmental disasters. Ten years later, the case was still generating legal proceedings and discussions about the impacts of the activity.
Perhaps the most disturbing part is that the activity continued to grow.
Instead of treating these episodes as signs that something is structurally wrong, Brazil continued to approach live-animal exports as simply another form of commercial activity.
The animal is loaded. The ship leaves. The cargo arrives. And the suffering remains invisible along the way.
When the animal becomes cargo, the logic becomes clear
Live-animal exports are a different issue from antimicrobial use. But both phenomena reveal the same underlying logic: when an animal is treated primarily as a commodity, its needs become subordinate to economic efficiency.
At sea, the animal becomes cargo. In intensive production, it becomes a production unit. In the marketplace, it becomes a product.
And when something goes wrong, the first question is almost always: How much will it cost? How much will it cost to adapt the system, reduce stocking densities, eliminate cages, or improve handling?
Rarely do we begin with the question that should be at the center: What does it cost the animal to continue living under these conditions?
The European decision should make us ask what we are doing before we need medication.
Are we preventing disease? Are we creating conditions that allow animals to remain healthy? Are we reducing sources of stress? Are we considering natural behavior? Are we using production systems that respect animals’ biological needs?
Or are we trying to make animals genetically selected to produce more and more, confined in increasingly efficient systems, remain productive for as long as necessary to complete their economic cycle?
That distinction is fundamental.
And who pays the price?
When a supply chain faces a sanitary barrier, the debate quickly turns into numbers.
In 2025, Brazil’s agribusiness exports reached US$169.2 billion. Beef exports hit record levels, generating US$17.9 billion in revenue and a 20.4% increase in export volume, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture.
Being a global production leader should not mean simply producing more. It should mean being capable of setting higher standards.
Brazil can continue treating animal lives as a necessary cost of producing protein at scale. Or it can recognize that a truly modern industry is not one that merely manages to produce more.
It is one that can produce without turning animal suffering into an invisible part of its efficiency.