Should Sinergia Animal be credited for helping Alibem’s piglets?
Summary
Adam Hebert from Vetted Causes asked me in May for feedback on Animal Charity Evaluators’ (ACE’s) and Sinergia Animal’s cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of Sinergia’s work on helping pigs in 2023. Adam told me this work should not be credited for helping piglets through Alibem’s commitments, which account for 54.4 % of its impact. I basically agree with Adam.
Sinergia’s work on helping pigs accounts for a small fraction of their expenditures. So the points I make have little direct impact on ACE’s recommendation of Sinergia. At the same time, I feel they warrant further scrutiny of CEAs more broadly, both of other programs from Sinergia, and ones from other organisations.
Should Sinergia Animal be credited for helping Alibem’s piglets?
Adam from Vetted Causes asked me in May for feedback on ACE’s and Sinergia’s CEA of Sinergia’s work on helping pigs in 2023. Adam donated 200 $ to the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) as my compensation.
Adam told me Sinergia’s work in 2023 should not be credited for helping piglets through Alibem’s commitments. In Sinergia’s words, these referred to “banning pig painful procedures (surgical castration and banning teeth clipping/disbudding) by 2023”. I basically agree with Adam for the reasons below, which I commented about on July 21. Those commitments account for 54.4 % of the impact of Sinergia’s work on helping pigs (= “suffering-adjusted days (SADs) of piglets averted through Alibem’s commitments”/“SADs averted” = 272*10^6/(500*10^6)), of which 92.9 % and 7.07 % come from ending surgical castration and teeth clipping.
ACE’s and Sinergia’s assumptions imply Sinergia’s contribution in 2023 towards the aforementioned commitments was as impactful as their full implementation for 7.70 more years (= “piglets impacted”/“piglets impacted per year”*“factor to account for the work of other organisations” = 26.4*10^6/(2.40*10^6)*0.70). However:
Alibem said in 2023 they have eliminated surgical castration from their protocols since 2010. Their statement is in Portuguese, but here is the translation from Google Translate, which I can confirm is accurate as a native Portuguese speaker. “In line with the guidelines expressed in its Animal Welfare Policy, Alibem voluntarily assumes the following commitments regarding this topic:” “Continue to apply immunocastration, instead of surgical castration – a procedure voluntarily eliminated from the Company’s protocols since 2010”. This was 13 to 14 years before Alibem announced the commitment on 1 November 2023.
Teeth clipping became illegal in Brazil, where Alibem operates, on 1 February 2021 based on the 2nd point of article 38, and article 54 of Normative Instruction 113. Here is their translation from Google Translate, which I confirm is accurate. “Teeth cutting is prohibited”. “This Normative Instruction comes into effect on February 1, 2021”. This was 2 years and 9 months before Alibem announced the commitment on 1 November 2023, when they said they would “Continue the practice of not wearing down piglets’ teeth, except when it has a negative impact on the welfare of the sow and/or the litter”.
Alibem’s commitments referred to a welfare reform they had fully implemented 13 to 14 years before their announcement, and to continue obeying a law which came into effect 2 years and 9 months before. So I suspect Alibem took an opportunity to get positive press for welfare reforms they had already fully implemented, and were not planning to roll back. This is in agreement with Sinergia not doing a pre-campaign, sending a campaign notice, or launching a campaign. In addition, Sinergia said Alibem “commited to” “banning pig painful procedures”, which alludes to ensuring implementation instead of no backtracking.
Carolina Galvani, Sinergia’s executive director, commented “informal policies cannot be considered progress until they are publicly announced and open to scrutiny”. I can see public commitments being valuable to prevent the reversal of welfare reforms. At the same time, I believe it is very unlikely that Sinergia was responsible, for example, for Alibem surgically castrating all of their piglets for 7.70 more years, or half of them for 15.4 more years (= 7.70/0.5) instead of not performing any surgical castration at all.
Carolina noted the prohibition on teeth clipping has not been enforced. I do not dispute this. Regardless of how much it has been enforced, I think it is unlikely that Sinergia was responsible, for example, for Alibem fully obeying the law for 7.70 more years, or half obeying it for 15.4 more years instead of not obeying it at all. In any case, this point has little direct impact, as it only covers 7.07 % of the impact linked to Alibem’s commitments.
Adam also asked me in July to review Carolina Galvani’s comments on Vetted Causes’ posts on Sinergia’s work on helping pigs. Adam donated 100 $ to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund as my compensation. I believe there are more issues besides the 2 above. You can check my replies to Carolina’s comments if you are interested.
Nevertheless, I consider crediting Sinergia for 7.70 years of Alibem not surgically castrating any of their piglets is the most important issue to address. It accounts for 50.5 % (= 0.929*0.544) of the impact of Sinergia’s work on helping pigs. I think this is meaningful enough for ACE and Sinergia to update the CEA, and for ACE to note this in their review of Sinergia. Vince Mak, ACE’s charity evaluations manager, said they have now noted the following on the CEA.
Additionally, since the last update, we received feedback suggesting that this figure should be revised downwards, as Alibem had an existing voluntary commitment regarding surgical castration and a normative order addressing teeth clipping in Brazil (albeit likely poorly enforced). However, this commitment had never been public or open to scrutiny before September 2023, and because this clarification does not affect our recommendation of Sinergia, we decided not to make further edits.
Vince commented Sinergia’s work on helping pigs only represents 9 % of their expenditures. So I agree the points I make have little direct impact on the recommendation of Sinergia. At the same time, I feel they warrant further scrutiny of CEAs more broadly, both of other programs from Sinergia, and ones from other organisations.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Adam Hebert, Anonymous Person 1, Anonymous Person 2, Carolina Galvani, and Vince Mak for feedback on the draft. The views expressed in the post are my own.
(I’m not expressing an opinion in this comment on how significant I think the issues with the pig CEA are, but on how much updating on the desirability of deep-diving into other Singeria and non-Singeria CEAs is warranted after the reader makes that decision for themselves.)
I think the extent to which that is correct depends significantly on how the issues came to light. Vasco looked into aspects of Singeria’s pig programs because of Adam’s prior work on the subject. So the selection was not representative of CEAs, and requires caution in deciding how much to update on a random non-pig Singeria or non-Singeria CEA. For instance, I do not know whether Adam:
Randomly selected the Singeria pig CEA and committed to doing a deep dive prior to doing any of the work (the strongest case for significant updates on other CEAs);
Eyeballed various CEAs and chose one or more that looked more likely to be iffy for a deep dive; or
Looked at various CEAs in depth and published on the one that ended up the most flawed (in which case the pig program can be viewed as evidence about the upper bound on reliability issues more so than the typical level of issues).
I would not find any of these approaches inappropriate per se for a third-party evaluator, although I would expect the evaluator to disclose the third approach if employed. But I do think they differ significantly as to how likely the pig CEA is to be representative of Singeria’s CEAs, or a broader class of CEAs.
Thanks, Jason. @VettedCauses may want to comment on that. I would be surprised if they had looked into many CEAs from ACE in depth before publishing a review of Sinergia’s. Based on my experience, I would say CEAs from basically all organisations besides GiveWell would benefit from more scrutiny. I often find myself concluding the cost-effectiveness should be updated by at least a factor of 2.
Sinergia’s response:
Although the author thanks us for our feedback in the article, we do not agree that this was done accordingly.
Sinergia appreciates the transparency regarding the involvement with Vetted Causes for the research done to produce this article and is partially glad that a Portuguese speaker was later involved. However, we remain concerned that the author, not being Brazilian and seemingly failing to consult Brazilian experts, repetitively overlooked important local context and industry knowledge — as already explained in previous responses provided by Sinergia.
It has been a tiring experience to have to explain more than once that the cited normative instruction is not an enforced law in Brazil to see some changes later implemented in the text. At the final stages, we were requested to assist in identifying experts to check this text’s assumptions. This approach is unproductive and harms organizations aiming to work effectively. Moving forward, such processes must be conducted differently, with genuine respect for local expertise and proper consultation from the outset.
Regarding Alibem, Sinergia Animal and many other NGOs only consider a corporate policy valid once it becomes public, transparent, and verifiable. If Alibem had indeed adopted certain practices earlier, the formal and public commitment to them only occurred after Sinergia’s engagement through Pigs In Focus. A proof of this is that in 2022, Alibem didn’t report any public or permanent animal welfare policies during consultation for the publication of Pigs in Focus. Hidden or informal policies cannot be considered progress until they are publicly announced and open to scrutiny.
The article also neglects to recognize a well-established and effective advocacy tactic: publicly ranking companies. Such rankings foster competition among companies, encouraging them to avoid negative public perception and prompting the adoption of new welfare policies — often creating positive ripple effects across the industry. Initiatives such as Pigs in Focus have successfully demonstrated the effective impact of this approach. Securing new policies is not merely about sending campaign notices or running campaigns like the article suggests; a ranking in itself is a powerful pressure tactic that drives measurable change.
We also regret the disrespectful tone and sensationalism that have characterized most parts of this unethical process initiated by Vetted Causes. Fortunately, our long-term supporters — who are familiar with our rigorous programs and their tactics and have witnessed the tangible impact of our work for pigs in Brazil — have also followed this process closely and still trust our integrity and seriousness.
Sinergia is always open to accepting adjustments to our cost-effectiveness assessment if such revisions were conducted through ethical, professional, and contextually grounded analysis–instead of the approach adopted so far as described in the previous paragraph.
For these reasons, we have preferred and are likely to keep opting not to engage with all comments and posts on this forum if they involve sensationalism, unethical behavior and incomplete and unproductive methods of research. We are committed to focusing our time and energy on continuing our important work rather than fueling unprofessional and unbalanced debates.
Thanks, Carolina.
I would still be grateful if you could point me to the relevant experts, or explain why the points I make in the post do not hold. In particular, the point about surgical castration, which accounts 92.9 % of the impact linked to Alibem’s commitments. In addition to asking you about experts’ thoughts on November 4, I also emailed a few people from Alibem on November 1, but I have not heard back.
I am not questioning Sinergia’s role in Alibem announcing they will “Continue to apply immunocastration, instead of surgical castration – a procedure voluntarily eliminated from the Company’s protocols since 2010”. I just do not think this implies they would, without Sinergia’s work in 2023, for example, surgically castrate all of their piglets for 7.70 more years, or half of them for 15.4 more years instead of not performing any surgical castration at all.
My understanding is that you are saying I was disrepectful and sensationalist. If so, what could I have done differently besides trying to contact Brazilian experts earlier?