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The comments on this article take for granted that agricultural use of antibiotics is a key driver of the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). This is an intuitive and popular explanation, but the magnitude of this effect is not well established.

As an example, [0] is of the best reviews available on the contribution of non-therapeutic antibiotic usage in animal feeds to AMR. Despite the large amount of evidence cited, the authors can't conclude that a ban on animal use of antibiotic class X would lead to Y more years before resistance to X emerges/spreads.

It seems well established that banning use of certain antibiotics as a feed additive would slow the emergence of resistance, but that magnitude of that effect seems totally unknown. There is perhaps a strong precautionary principle argument to be made for banning use of medically important antibiotics as feed additives, but we should be cautious in making any firm conclusions about how much that would impact the medically useful lifetime of existing or new antibiotics.

In a similar vein, the idea that commercial prospects for antibiotic development are limited because agricultural use would cause fast emergence is not supported from what I can find. A very good recent paper [1] discussing failures of antibiotic development in the US in the last 20 years highlights trial, regulatory, and commercial hurdles as key roadblocks to successful commercialization of antibiotics.

[0] https://journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.1128/cmr.00002-11 [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03452-0