Sri Lanka, July 7 -- Sri Lanka consumes roughly 258,000 metric tonnes of chicken annually, according to the Department of Animal Production and Health and that figure has been climbing steadily as protein awareness grows and fast food culture deepens.

Behind that volume lies a practice that most consumers never see, the routine use of antibiotics in commercial poultry farming, applied not to treat disease but to accelerate growth and compensate for poor biosecurity. New Anthoney's Farms, one of Sri Lanka's few antibiotic-free poultry producers, has spent years building a credible counter-argument to that norm, and the science increasingly backs its position.

Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is the process by which bacteria, viruses, fu...