Kieran Greig is the Chief Strategy Analyst at Rethink Priorities. He works with the Leadership Team to advise on Rethink Priorities’ strategy and execution, at all levels. Prior to that, he was the Director of Research for Farmed Animal Funders, a group of large donors who each give over $250,000 annually to end factory farming. He previously worked as a researcher at Animal Charity Evaluators, and prior to that was a co-founder of Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health. He has written about topics like improving the welfare of farmed fish and supporting plant-based alternatives to animal products. He has a B. Sc. from Monash University and a Masters from La Trobe University.
Thanks for your engagement!
Yes, for instance, as mentioned in the appendix, some non-fictitious examples for Global Health and Development are:
And for AI Governance and Strategy respectively, some examples could include the following:
You're right! Just updated :)
Ah, thanks. Fixing that now :)
Thanks for flagging! I will fix that now :)
Interesting point and thanks for raising, Saulius. :)
That specific grant actually hasn’t been made yet. Though we approved of it, I believe it’s waiting on the university to finalize something before the funds are allocated. So, I am going to strike it from the list of grants at the top of the report (I was meant to do this before but forgot to do this even though I removed it from the paragraphs of the payout report, my apologies).
To further address your point though, I think the counterfactuals here are tricky to think about and I wouldn’t confidently claim that wild harvesting prevents more suffering than it causes. Would be keen for folks to think about both of those more!
In terms of the quick case for the grant, I think it is more exploratory and probably helpful information to have in case there are significant increases in farmed carmine production in the future. Particularly, I thought that for carmine, it was like the case for wild-caught fish. As in, demand currently outstripes finite supply, so fluctuations in demand therefore mightn't impact current supply much. E.g.:
"However, demand is rising and because the supply is finite - it is difficult for Peruvian farmers to substantially boost supplies - the price has soared in recent years.
Back in 2013 Peru's exports of carmine totalled 531 tonnes, which was worth $22m. So over the past four years, the price per tonne has risen by 73%." (link)
Further to that, occasionally, I think there are big spikes in price when exogenous events constrain supply. (link)
And, if current demand were to sustain or increase it seems like a marginal increase in industry would come from the farmed side. E.g.,
“High demand is fuelling the search for innovative production techniques in order to move away from dependence on the prickly pear, which carries a number of limitations.” (link)
““Habitat for cacti is limited, growth of both host and parasite are slow, and extraction procedures are woefully inefficient,” Dapson says. “Improvements in extraction and purification have been made, but they don’t address the core problem, which is production of the insects.”” (link)
So, exploring alternatives now could more so contribute to reductions on the expansion on the farmed side in the future. Perhaps it, therefore, isn’t too dependent on views around whether wild harvesting prevents more suffering than it causes.
Good flag! :)
Fwiw, looks like rerunning the analysis with the relative bounds on chicken moral worth being a ten-billionth to a thousandth of a human, rather than a twenty thousandth to 10 humans, still outputs a mean cost-effectiveness ratio of CCCW to MIF of ~1.3.
So though it is a pretty significant factor, choosing different values there seems unlikely by themselves to directionally change the output.
I also don't think that the expected moral weight of more than twice that of a human is that intrinsic to Muehlhauser numbers. Seems like it is more like something of an artifact that comes from putting a log-normal distribution to that confidence interval.
But I also I think it is all somewhat beside the point that could really be at play:
For farmed animal welfare, as per the title: ”We need more nuance regarding funding gaps”, I think it is indeed more nuanced than “there is more money than opps for funding in farmed animal welfare.”
Quickly consider the likes of:
On the other hand:
So both opportunity and funding bottlenecks apply at the movement level for farmed animal welfare. But, the nuance is that they really apply to quite differing extents to different parts of the movement.
Hey! Good q :) Apologies for the slower reply- I was OOO for a few weeks.
So in addition to all those grants being for EA Superstars... I think we may have just made an error in the copy and pasting process between Google Docs and posting here and on the ea funds site. :)
Specifically the "*" elsewhere (e.g., on Contentful) indicates bolding or italics and we had all these heading parts bolded or italicized (for other grants too) previously.
I have removed all the * now.
Thanks for asking about it!
First, I think this is a really good flag on an important issue and a great first post :)
As others mentioned CIWF have a good Octopus farming report highlighting the terrible consequences for animal welfare (underrated but I believe that Octopus could live 2-3 years in these conditions). I believe CIWF also presented the report to the Animal Welfare Intergroup of the European Parliament! They have also written to various places (governments, governors etc.) trying to have the practice outlawed or shut down.
Specifically within some of the key countries in Europe for this, namely Spain and Italy, Equalia and Essere Animali respectively might have interest in working on this. Though so far I am unsure how much either have worked on this.
However, I guess I’d say prospects for nipping this in the bud from a legislative perspective seem unclear to me. As in, say a country like Spain outlaws the practice of farming octopus (which in itself may be pretty unlikely), then I think a big multinational company like Nueva Pescanova (the company claiming to start the first commercial octopus farm) perhaps just goes to some other country they work in (and they are present in 20ish).
Further, research labs all over the world (US included) continue to chip away at farming octopus. And if one of the big seafood/fish farming countries in east asia (think Japan and/or China) takes up the helm, which they may as they have both big seafood companies and big domestic markets for octopus, I am really not sure we have the political power there yet (or will for some time) to try and nip it in the bud there.
A line of reasoning that I am maybe a bit more optimistic about is that perhaps we can nip this one in the bud from a capital perspective?
Nueva Pescanova (the company claiming they’ll be selling farmed octopus in 2023) has some seemingly poor financials. They went through a debt equity swap earlier this year and had basically declared bankruptcy and then restructured in ~2015.
They are reportedly planning to invest over 50M euro to create the farm. The farm will produce 2400 tonnes of finished product annually. The wholesale price for the wild type of this octopus product is ~11,000 euro/tonne (p.13). If that is the wholesale price, it gives ~26M euro turnover a year. I think it also takes more than a year to raise octopuses to be adults so they may not see that for 2-3 years, so maybe that should be modelled as being time discounted.
Then the running costs for the port facility would involve reportedly employing 450 staff (at ~20k euro each that would come to 9M euro/year). It will also take the equivalent of at least something like a few tonne’s of fishmeal per tonne of octopus (fishmeal at ~1250 euro per tonne) and would guess they have to use feed somewhat more expensive for octopus. Electricity sounds like a big factor too given they wanted to go ahead with the farm in the canary islands (rather than having the farm in Galicia, Spain the companies, headquarters, they looked to the canary islands because the electricity bill there would not be excessive). So might I’d tentatively guess they could be looking at millions of dollars per production cycle in electricity costs.
All that is probably why they are seeking a grant from the EU to fund this first farm. Otherwise they could be looking at least several years until getting a positive ROI on it. So I think that could be a good thing to target efforts against, as if the EU doesn’t offer funding, plausibly this farm doesn’t go ahead. But maybe Nueva Pescanova would just go ahead with it anyway though, and just absorb some greater initial losses though.
Same food for thought at least! I guess would be curious to find groups who might want to target that capital side of it now.
> Also, how do you judge their expected marginal cost-effectiveness? Do you do back-of-the-envelope calculations? Compare to previous projects with estimates? Check the project team's own estimates (and make adjustments as necessary)? All of the above? Any others?
It varies by project and depends on who the grant investigator is.
If a) the project is relatively well-suited to a back of the envelope and b) a back of the envelope seems decision-relevant, then we will engage in one. Right now, a) and b) seem true in a minority of cases, maybe ~10%-25% of applications depending on the round to give some rough sense. However, note that there tends to be some difference between projects in areas or by groups we have already evaluated vs projects/groups/areas that are newer to us. I’d say newer projects/groups areas are more likely to receive a back of the envelope style estimate. In cases where we do them, we generally look to compare to one’s we have previously done. If the project team submits an estimate (which tends to be relatively rare, again perhaps in that 10-25% range and they can be of varying quality), a fund manager will certainly review and note thoughts during the grant investigation.
More generally, here are some of the main general things that I’d say we like to look at to judge marginal cost-effectiveness (though note again the extent really depends on the fund manger and the specifics of the application):
The investigator produces a brief write-up summarizing their overall thinking, and assigns a vote to the application.