Antibiotic Resistance and Aquaculture: Why It Matters for One Health

2026-02-22

Aquaculture supplies more than half of the world’s seafood and plays a critical role in food security, livelihoods, and nutrition - particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Yet the rapid expansion and intensification of fish and shrimp farming has also brought growing challenges, including infectious disease outbreaks and the widespread use of antibiotics. These dynamics make aquaculture a key, and often under-addressed, front in the global action to contain antibiotic resistance, and more broadly, antimicrobial resistance.

In many settings, antibiotics are used not only for treatment but also but also to prevent disease, often in contexts where veterinary oversight, diagnostics, and biosecurity are limited. Residual antibiotics and resistant bacteria can spread through water systems, sediments, and food chains, linking aquaculture directly to human and environmental health risks.

Water ecosystems

What makes aquaculture particularly complex from an antimicrobial resistance (AMR) perspective is its direct coupling to water ecosystems. Antibiotics are typically delivered through medicated feed in open or semi-open water systems. Not all feed is consumed, and even when it is, a significant share of the drug is excreted un-metabolized back into the surrounding water and sediments.

Unlike on land – where antibiotic residues are relatively contained – antibiotics in aquatic systems can disperse through currents, mixing, and sediment flows. This exposes vast and diverse microbial communities to low levels of antibiotics, creating ideal conditions for the selection and spread of resistant bacteria and resistance genes. In this way, antibiotic use in aquaculture becomes not only a veterinary issue, but an environmental and public health concern with ecosystem-wide implications.

Addressing AMR in aquaculture is therefore not a niche concern – it is central to a functional One Health approach.

Insights from global and European policy arenas

Over the past year, this issue has featured prominently in several high-level discussions that ReAct has engaged with.

At the Responsible Seafood Summit  Fall of 2025 in Colombia, organized by the Global Seafood Alliance, conversations highlighted both progress and persistent gaps. While certification schemes and corporate commitments are driving reductions in antibiotic use in parts of the sector, smaller producers – especially in low- and middle-income countries – often lack access to affordable diagnostics, systems for early detection of disease outbreaks, and practical alternatives to antibiotics. This creates uneven progress and risks reinforcing global inequities in AMR stewardship.

Similarly, at the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union One Health Conference end 2025, hosted by the Ministry for Food Agriculture and Fisheries of Denmark together with WHO Regional Office for Europe, aquaculture was increasingly recognized as a missing piece in One Health implementation. Discussions underscored the need to better integrate aquatic food systems into national AMR action plans, surveillance frameworks, and cross-sectoral governance.

From surveillance gaps to practical solutions

A recurring message across these forums is that technical solutions alone are not enough. What is needed are context-appropriate, scalable approaches that work for farmers, regulators, and communities alike.

Promising pathways include:

• community-generated data
• low-cost technologies and
• analytics to enable early detection of disease and AMR risks
• strengthen on-farm biosecurity, and
• translate local evidence into actionable insights for farmers and policymakers.

By combining participatory data collection with digital reporting tools and analytics that link environmental, animal, and human health signals, solutions could deliver measurable reductions in antibiotic use within three years.

Crucially, these approaches can generate scalable models that improve AMR stewardship in aquaculture while supporting resilient livelihoods and safer food systems for vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries. This is where One Health moves from principle to practice.

Looking Ahead: Keeping aquaculture on the On Health AMR agenda

The coming year offers several strategic opportunities to elevate aquaculture within global AMR and One Health discussions.

From a sectoral and scientific perspective, forums such as the Responsible Seafood Summit 2026  held in September in Bangkok and the 9th World One Health Congress provide important platforms to connect seafood actors, researchers, and policymakers around concrete solutions.

From a policy standpoint, 2026 will be a critical checkpoint year for the commitments made in the UN AMR Declaration 2024, which outlines key targets – including a 10% reduction in global AMR-related deaths by 2030 and decreased antibiotic use across the agri-food sector.

Progress will be reviewed at the Seventy-ninth World Health Assembly in May and the 5th High-Level Ministerial on Antimicrobial Resistance in Abuja, Nigeria end June. The fact that the 5th Ministerial will take place in Abuja is particularly relevant. Recent reporting has highlighted how antibiotic misuse is already threatening Nigeria’s aquaculture sector, underscoring the urgency of addressing AMR across aquatic food systems in low- and middle-income countries. The host country itself illustrates why aquaculture must not remain peripheral in global AMR discussions.

Ensuring that aquaculture is meaningfully represented in these processes will be essential. Without it, global AMR strategies risk overlooking one of the fastest-growing food systems – and missing a major opportunity for impact.