Abstract

Antibiotic use in livestock production is one of the drivers of antibiotic resistance and a shift towards better and reduced antibiotic usage is urgently required. In Vietnam, where there are frequent reports of the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, little attention has been paid to farmers who have successfully changed their practices. This qualitative study aims to understand the transition process of Vietnamese chicken farmers toward reduced antibiotic usage. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 chicken farmers, 13 drug sellers, and 5 traders using participatory tools and a socio-anthropological approach. We explored the farmers' histories, current and past antibiotic usage, methods used to reduce antibiotic use, and motivations and barriers to changing practices. Through the thematic analysis of the farmers' transcripts, we identified technical, economic, and social factors that influence change. Out of eighteen farmers, we identified ten farmers who had already reduced antibiotic usage. The main motivations included producing quality chickens (tasty and safe) while reducing farm expenditures. Barriers were related to poor biosecurity in the area, market failures, and the farmers' lack of knowledge. Innovation led to overcome these obstacles included the local development of handmade probiotics and the organization of farmer cooperatives to overcome economic difficulties and guarantee product outlets. Knowledge was increased by workshops organized at the communal level and the influence of competent veterinarians in the area. We showed that the transition process was influenced by several components of the system rather than by any individual alone. Our study demonstrated that local initiatives to reduce antibiotic use in Vietnamese chicken production do exist. As changes depend on the system in which stakeholders are embedded, systemic lock-ins must be removed to allow practices to change. The promotion of locally-developed solutions should be further encouraged.

Copyright: © 2023 Bâtie et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Bâtie C, Tran Minh H, Thi Vu VA, Thuy Luong D, Thi Pham T, Fortané N, et al. (2023) Reducing antimicrobial use in chicken production in Vietnam: Exploring the systemic dimension of change. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0290296. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290296

Editor: Anselme Shyaka, UGHE: University of Global Health Equity, RWANDA

Received: January 18, 2023; Accepted: August 3, 2023; Published: September 8, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Bâtie et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All files are available from the database (DOI https://doi.org/10.18167/DVN1/GITSRP). We have carefully removed all sensitive information including names, ages, addresses and specific dates that could be used to identify the respondents to protect their anonymity. The transcripts have been uploaded in a data repository with the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.18167/DVN1/GITSRP under the license CC-BY. The contact of the Ethical Review Board of Hanoi Public Health University is the following: irb@huph.edu.vn.

Funding: The ROADMAP project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement Number 817626 (https://www.roadmap-h2020.eu/). The project started in June 2019 and will end in May 2023. Part of this study was funded by the GREASE network (https://www.grease-network.org/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Click here for fulltext paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0290296