With regards to the first, I do agree that this would be a concern, and would be important to attempt to mitigate. Advocating for the reallocation of subsidies from animal agriculture to arable agriculture and/or the domestic production of alternative proteins, alongside carrying out public-facing messaging interventions could lead to a reduction in the level of animal production consumption and as such limit the extent to which demand for foreign animal products with poor welfare standards rises. Further, even if this cannot be directly mitigated, there are likely to be efforts to improve welfare standards in systems that are already industrialized, such as through the work of Animal Policy International and the Open Wing Alliance. Therefore, counterfactually, there may be a net reduction in animal suffering by preventing the industrialization of agriculture in a Sub-Saharan nation like Nigeria, even if this leads to a slight increase in the scale of an already large and industrialized system, where there is more likely to be efforts to improve welfare standards.
To your second point, this is a very interesting consideration—thank you. I agree that it is worth considering whether interventions at earlier points on the gradient of intensification. A priority would be to understand what drives and facilitates farms to transition along the gradient, and how long they tend to exist at each point, in the hope of identifying particularly significant steps that could be targeted.
For the last point, I would have suggested you discuss this with Moritz Stumpe, but I see that he has already got there! My main thought is that it would be critical to determine the distribution supply of battery cages across the nations that export them, to identify whether focusing policy efforts in a few key countries would be effective to meaningfully limit supply.
Thanks for your thoughts here!
With regards to the first, I do agree that this would be a concern, and would be important to attempt to mitigate. Advocating for the reallocation of subsidies from animal agriculture to arable agriculture and/or the domestic production of alternative proteins, alongside carrying out public-facing messaging interventions could lead to a reduction in the level of animal production consumption and as such limit the extent to which demand for foreign animal products with poor welfare standards rises. Further, even if this cannot be directly mitigated, there are likely to be efforts to improve welfare standards in systems that are already industrialized, such as through the work of Animal Policy International and the Open Wing Alliance. Therefore, counterfactually, there may be a net reduction in animal suffering by preventing the industrialization of agriculture in a Sub-Saharan nation like Nigeria, even if this leads to a slight increase in the scale of an already large and industrialized system, where there is more likely to be efforts to improve welfare standards.
To your second point, this is a very interesting consideration—thank you. I agree that it is worth considering whether interventions at earlier points on the gradient of intensification. A priority would be to understand what drives and facilitates farms to transition along the gradient, and how long they tend to exist at each point, in the hope of identifying particularly significant steps that could be targeted.
For the last point, I would have suggested you discuss this with Moritz Stumpe, but I see that he has already got there! My main thought is that it would be critical to determine the distribution supply of battery cages across the nations that export them, to identify whether focusing policy efforts in a few key countries would be effective to meaningfully limit supply.