ABSTRACT
The extensive use of antibiotics in agriculture has escalated with the increasing demand for food by the world’s rising population; the use of antibiotics has pros and cons. As bacteria become resistant to traditional antibiotics, newly discovered antibiotics were used to combat emerging infections. This, in turn, led to increased resistance in bacteria, resulting in a dramatic and ever-increasing war and race between bacteria and new antimicrobials developed by pharmaceutical corporations. Sadly for human health, germs adapt considerably more swiftly and cheaply than pharmaceutical corporations, and as a result, we are losing the race. Several emerging diseases are resistant to almost all antimicrobials. Antimicrobials are the foundations of modern medicine and have made significant contributions to the advancement of healthcare over the last half century. As a result, the ongoing trends in AMR must be reversed or we shall return to the dark ages of medicine. Antibiotic resistance is a naturally occurring mechanism that can be reduced but not totally eliminated because resistance is an unavoidable result of antibiotic selection pressure. The negative impacts of antibiotics have been associated with severe health hazards in humans and animals and induce antibiotic resistance among the vast range of plant pathogenic microbes. The antimicrobial resistant microbes cause massive losses to crop yield and productivity. Apart from the health issue for humans, the resistant microbe escalates elements of agrarian distress in agricultural-dependent countries, like poverty, rise in agricultural input cost, reduced productivity, uncontrol plant diseases, etc. The chapter deals with the grief caused by the application of antibiotics in the agricultural system.
