(I don’t really want to engage much on this because I found it pretty emotionally draining last time — I’ll just leave this comment and stop here):
I think asking for feedback prior to publishing these seems really important. To be clear, I’m very sympathetic to the overall claim! I suspect that most published estimates of the impact of marginal dollars in the farmed animal space are way too high (maybe even by orders of magnitude)
I also think the items you raise are important questions for Sinergia to answer!
But, I think getting feedback would be really helpful for you:
You cite multiple places where Sinergia claims impact, but you cite evidence to the contrary, such as company statements on their sites either existing prior to Sinergia’s claimed date, or not existing at all.
The experience of corporate campaigners universally is that the degree to which you should take company statements about their animal welfare commitments seriously is relatively low. It’s just a regular fact of corporate campaigning in many countries that companies have statements on their websites that they either don’t follow or don’t intend to follow. Often, companies have weaselly language that lets them get out of a commitment, e.g. “we aspire to do X by Y year,” etc.
The language in company statements matter a ton — when I ran corporate campaigns, a major US restaurant company I was campaigning on put up a verbatim version of the Better Chicken Commitment with all of the specifics removed (e.g. “reduce stocking density” instead of “reduce stocking density to X lbs/sqft”) and did nothing in their supply chain. This allowed them to tell journalists / others that we were just lying that they had not made the commitment. I worry that Google translating pages loses nuance that might matter here. Google Translating Brazilian law also seems like a huge stretch as evidence — and taking the law at face value as a non-Brazilian lawyer (and not evidence about the interpretation and enforcement of the law) seems like a mistake.
Getting a commitment on the website is important, but it’s only a portion of work. Actually getting the company to make the change is way more work.
I know nothing about the JBS case, but can tell you that there are many times where a company has a commitment, then behind the scenes the actual work is several years of getting them to honor it. It seems completely plausible, and even routine, that the actual impact credit should go to an organization working to get a company to act on an existing policy, as opposed to getting them to put up the policy in the first place. I don’t know anything about Sinergia’s claims here, but seems totally plausible that much of their impact comes from this invisible work that you wouldn’t learn about without asking them.
I suspect that in your critique, some of your claims are warranted, but others might have much more complicated stories behind them, such as an organization getting a company to actually follow through on a commitment, or getting a law to be enforced. I think that feedback would help draw out where these critiques are accurate, and where they are missing the mark.
I just want to add some colour as someone from a Western country (Canada) that has lived a couple years in Latin America. The rule of law is simply followed far less and it is a far lower trust society. However much American companies follow corporate commitments, I expect less of Brazilian ones.
Also, companies in Western countries don’t follow the law all the time. In Latin America, the law is a bit of a joke and there is more corruption. The fact that it was already illegal updates me ~0 on what a factory farm in Brazil is doing.
Serious question: doesn’t that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?
Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one’s incentivised to uphold the laws, but there’s a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain.
So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.
People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it’s definitely something people have in mind.
People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).
I think the problem of entities lying about what they’re doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they’re expecting are the ones they’re getting.
Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn’t have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it’s possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I’d still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don’t seem justifiable either.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to read our article. You make some interesting points.
In terms of the work Sinergia did to claim credit for helping millions of pigs, it is listed in Column W of this spreadsheet.
For example, in Cell W5: “After the impacts of Pigs in Focus rank 1st edition and dozen of meetings, Aurora published in 2023 the commitment to banning surgical castration in pigs. Alianima engaged positively with the company.”
Most of the descriptions are quite similar to this. Note that “Pigs in Focus” is an annual report that Sinergia began publishing in 2022.
Hi Marcus, thank you for your reply. We agree with you on a lot of what you’ve said. However, we would like to clarify something.
However much American companies follow corporate commitments, I expect less of Brazilian ones.
As we noted in our review, Sinergia allegedly secured a teeth clipping commitment from Pif Paf Alimentos (PPA).
Sinergia estimates that this commitment has helped over 1,000,000 piglets per year since 2023. Sinergia cites a source for their estimate, but the source states PPA slaughters only 750,000 pigs per year.[1] This makes it questionable if PPA even has 1,000,000 piglets that could be teeth clipped each year.
Thus, Sinergia’s estimate appears to rely on the assumption that without this commitment, PPA would have immediately started using teeth clipping on 100% of their piglets, but that with the commitment they will use teeth clipping on 0% of their piglets.
Sinergia appears to make this same assumption for all of the piglet/sow welfare commitments they allegedly secured.
Note: teeth clipping was also illegal in Brazil (PPA’s country) prior to the alleged commitment[2], and an archived version of the web page Sinergia cites for the commitment shows that the alleged commitment was already on PPA’s website prior to when the commitment was allegedly published[3].
Sinergia estimates that this commitment has helped over 1,000,000 piglets per year since 2023. Sinergia cites a source for their estimate, but the source states PPA slaughters only 750,000 pigs per year.[1] This makes it questionable if PPA even has 1,000,000 piglets that could be teeth clipped each year.
I think there might be a misunderstanding in the analysis regarding the number of piglets and the slaughter figures. A 25% pre-slaughter mortality rate is quite common in pig farming. [E.g. Pre-weaning piglet mortality varies largely between farms and ranges from 5 % to 35 %. European Parliament, The EU Pig Meat Sector, Sep 2020] This means it’s entirely possible that 1,000,000 piglets are born each year, and 25% (250,000) die before reaching slaughter age, leaving 750,000 to be slaughtered.
Therefore, Sinergia’s estimate that 1,000,000 piglets per year benefit from teeth clipping could still be accurate. The 1,000,000 figure likely refers to the total number of piglets born, all of whom could potentially have their teeth clipped, rather than the number that survive to slaughter.
Thank you for your response Johannes! We really appreciate it when people take the time to read our analysis, and question specific points. We encourage everyone to do the same.
I think there might be a misunderstanding in the analysis regarding the number of piglets and the slaughter figures. A 25% pre-slaughter mortality rate is quite common in pig farming.
We actually did account for pre-slaughter mortality rates in our analysis, but we used data specific to Brazil since that is where PPA is located. According to the study Swine Mortality and Productivity in Brazil – Benchmarks and Nutritional Solutions, the average pre-weaning mortality percentage is 8.91%, and the average growing-finishing mortality percentage is 3%.
This means it’s entirely possible that 1,000,000 piglets are born each year, and 25% (250,000) die before reaching slaughter age, leaving 750,000 to be slaughtered.
We acknowledge it is possible over 1,000,000 piglets could be teeth clipped each year at PPA. However, based on the available data, we think it is questionable (as we stated above).
Our main point in bringing up the slaughter numbers was to show that Sinergia’s estimate for the alleged commitment’s impact appears to rely on the assumption that without this commitment, PPA would have immediately started using teeth clipping on 100% of their piglets, but that with the commitment they will use teeth clipping on 0% of their piglets. This seems implausible given that PPA had already stated they don’t use teeth clipping prior to the alleged commitment, and teeth clipping was already illegal in Brazil prior to the alleged commitment.
We’d also like to note that there are cases where Sinergia’s estimates are likely more than 100% of the pigs that could be affected. In the JBS example we used in our article, Sinergia estimates that a commitment to not use gestation crates in new projects impacts 290,000 sows per year (see Cell L10). To justify this, Sinergia cites Alianima’s 2023 report, which states JBS has total 290,000 sows (see Cell P10). However, it seems very unlikely that JBS has 290,000 sows that are a part of new projects. We also checked the Alianima’s 2024 report, and it states JBS has 297,000 sows. This leads us to believe JBS is starting new projects at a much lower rate than Sinergia estimated.
With that being said, as we noted in our review, “the gestation crate policy that the alleged commitment references was already listed on JBS’s website in 2020, and has been in effect since that point.” In spite of this, Sinergia claims that JBS published a commitment for this in 2023 with a “Transition deadline” of 2023 (see Row 10).
We can provide other examples of estimates from Sinergia that we suspect are inflated if you’d like. The critique we published contains only a small fraction of our full analysis, because brevity is a top priority in our reviews.
Hi Abraham, thank you for taking the time to read our article and reply to this thread. We’re sorry for engaging with you negatively on our previous thread.
I worry that Google translating pages loses nuance that might matter here. Google Translating Brazilian law also seems like a huge stretch as evidence
If you’d like, we can provide additional sources stating this (one of our other sources cited in our article actually already does state this). However, the original writing of Normative Instruction 113/2020 is in only in Portuguese, so we are unable to provide an English version.
(I don’t really want to engage much on this because I found it pretty emotionally draining last time — I’ll just leave this comment and stop here):
I think asking for feedback prior to publishing these seems really important. To be clear, I’m very sympathetic to the overall claim! I suspect that most published estimates of the impact of marginal dollars in the farmed animal space are way too high (maybe even by orders of magnitude)
I also think the items you raise are important questions for Sinergia to answer!
But, I think getting feedback would be really helpful for you:
You cite multiple places where Sinergia claims impact, but you cite evidence to the contrary, such as company statements on their sites either existing prior to Sinergia’s claimed date, or not existing at all.
The experience of corporate campaigners universally is that the degree to which you should take company statements about their animal welfare commitments seriously is relatively low. It’s just a regular fact of corporate campaigning in many countries that companies have statements on their websites that they either don’t follow or don’t intend to follow. Often, companies have weaselly language that lets them get out of a commitment, e.g. “we aspire to do X by Y year,” etc.
The language in company statements matter a ton — when I ran corporate campaigns, a major US restaurant company I was campaigning on put up a verbatim version of the Better Chicken Commitment with all of the specifics removed (e.g. “reduce stocking density” instead of “reduce stocking density to X lbs/sqft”) and did nothing in their supply chain. This allowed them to tell journalists / others that we were just lying that they had not made the commitment. I worry that Google translating pages loses nuance that might matter here. Google Translating Brazilian law also seems like a huge stretch as evidence — and taking the law at face value as a non-Brazilian lawyer (and not evidence about the interpretation and enforcement of the law) seems like a mistake.
Getting a commitment on the website is important, but it’s only a portion of work. Actually getting the company to make the change is way more work.
I know nothing about the JBS case, but can tell you that there are many times where a company has a commitment, then behind the scenes the actual work is several years of getting them to honor it. It seems completely plausible, and even routine, that the actual impact credit should go to an organization working to get a company to act on an existing policy, as opposed to getting them to put up the policy in the first place. I don’t know anything about Sinergia’s claims here, but seems totally plausible that much of their impact comes from this invisible work that you wouldn’t learn about without asking them.
I suspect that in your critique, some of your claims are warranted, but others might have much more complicated stories behind them, such as an organization getting a company to actually follow through on a commitment, or getting a law to be enforced. I think that feedback would help draw out where these critiques are accurate, and where they are missing the mark.
I just want to add some colour as someone from a Western country (Canada) that has lived a couple years in Latin America. The rule of law is simply followed far less and it is a far lower trust society. However much American companies follow corporate commitments, I expect less of Brazilian ones.
Also, companies in Western countries don’t follow the law all the time. In Latin America, the law is a bit of a joke and there is more corruption. The fact that it was already illegal updates me ~0 on what a factory farm in Brazil is doing.
Serious question: doesn’t that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?
Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one’s incentivised to uphold the laws, but there’s a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain.
So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.
People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it’s definitely something people have in mind.
People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).
I think the problem of entities lying about what they’re doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they’re expecting are the ones they’re getting.
Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn’t have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it’s possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I’d still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don’t seem justifiable either.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to read our article. You make some interesting points.
In terms of the work Sinergia did to claim credit for helping millions of pigs, it is listed in Column W of this spreadsheet.
For example, in Cell W5: “After the impacts of Pigs in Focus rank 1st edition and dozen of meetings, Aurora published in 2023 the commitment to banning surgical castration in pigs. Alianima engaged positively with the company.”
Most of the descriptions are quite similar to this. Note that “Pigs in Focus” is an annual report that Sinergia began publishing in 2022.
Hi Marcus, thank you for your reply. We agree with you on a lot of what you’ve said. However, we would like to clarify something.
As we noted in our review, Sinergia allegedly secured a teeth clipping commitment from Pif Paf Alimentos (PPA).
Sinergia estimates that this commitment has helped over 1,000,000 piglets per year since 2023. Sinergia cites a source for their estimate, but the source states PPA slaughters only 750,000 pigs per year.[1] This makes it questionable if PPA even has 1,000,000 piglets that could be teeth clipped each year.
Thus, Sinergia’s estimate appears to rely on the assumption that without this commitment, PPA would have immediately started using teeth clipping on 100% of their piglets, but that with the commitment they will use teeth clipping on 0% of their piglets.
Sinergia appears to make this same assumption for all of the piglet/sow welfare commitments they allegedly secured.
Note: teeth clipping was also illegal in Brazil (PPA’s country) prior to the alleged commitment[2], and an archived version of the web page Sinergia cites for the commitment shows that the alleged commitment was already on PPA’s website prior to when the commitment was allegedly published[3].
This information can be found in Row 12 of Sinergia’s spreadsheet. Please let us know if there is anything we can clarify.
See Article 38Section 2 and Article 54 of Normative Instruction 113/2020.
Archived web page from PPA’s website from October 24, 2022.
Regarding this point:
I think there might be a misunderstanding in the analysis regarding the number of piglets and the slaughter figures. A 25% pre-slaughter mortality rate is quite common in pig farming. [E.g. Pre-weaning piglet mortality varies largely between farms and ranges from 5 % to 35 %. European Parliament, The EU Pig Meat Sector, Sep 2020] This means it’s entirely possible that 1,000,000 piglets are born each year, and 25% (250,000) die before reaching slaughter age, leaving 750,000 to be slaughtered.
Therefore, Sinergia’s estimate that 1,000,000 piglets per year benefit from teeth clipping could still be accurate. The 1,000,000 figure likely refers to the total number of piglets born, all of whom could potentially have their teeth clipped, rather than the number that survive to slaughter.
Thank you for your response Johannes! We really appreciate it when people take the time to read our analysis, and question specific points. We encourage everyone to do the same.
We actually did account for pre-slaughter mortality rates in our analysis, but we used data specific to Brazil since that is where PPA is located. According to the study Swine Mortality and Productivity in Brazil – Benchmarks and Nutritional Solutions, the average pre-weaning mortality percentage is 8.91%, and the average growing-finishing mortality percentage is 3%.
We acknowledge it is possible over 1,000,000 piglets could be teeth clipped each year at PPA. However, based on the available data, we think it is questionable (as we stated above).
Our main point in bringing up the slaughter numbers was to show that Sinergia’s estimate for the alleged commitment’s impact appears to rely on the assumption that without this commitment, PPA would have immediately started using teeth clipping on 100% of their piglets, but that with the commitment they will use teeth clipping on 0% of their piglets. This seems implausible given that PPA had already stated they don’t use teeth clipping prior to the alleged commitment, and teeth clipping was already illegal in Brazil prior to the alleged commitment.
We’d also like to note that there are cases where Sinergia’s estimates are likely more than 100% of the pigs that could be affected. In the JBS example we used in our article, Sinergia estimates that a commitment to not use gestation crates in new projects impacts 290,000 sows per year (see Cell L10). To justify this, Sinergia cites Alianima’s 2023 report, which states JBS has total 290,000 sows (see Cell P10). However, it seems very unlikely that JBS has 290,000 sows that are a part of new projects. We also checked the Alianima’s 2024 report, and it states JBS has 297,000 sows. This leads us to believe JBS is starting new projects at a much lower rate than Sinergia estimated.
With that being said, as we noted in our review, “the gestation crate policy that the alleged commitment references was already listed on JBS’s website in 2020, and has been in effect since that point.” In spite of this, Sinergia claims that JBS published a commitment for this in 2023 with a “Transition deadline” of 2023 (see Row 10).
We can provide other examples of estimates from Sinergia that we suspect are inflated if you’d like. The critique we published contains only a small fraction of our full analysis, because brevity is a top priority in our reviews.
Thanks for the clarification!
Hi Abraham, thank you for taking the time to read our article and reply to this thread. We’re sorry for engaging with you negatively on our previous thread.
The only thing we’d like to say for this thread is that we spent several hundred hours working on this review, and we can assure you that we did a lot of work to verify that what we said is true. We did not just Google translate documents and accept the translations as factual. For the “Brazilian law” you reference, Sinergia themselves stated in their 2023 report that “teeth clipping is prohibited” under Normative Instruction 113/2020.
If you’d like, we can provide additional sources stating this (one of our other sources cited in our article actually already does state this). However, the original writing of Normative Instruction 113/2020 is in only in Portuguese, so we are unable to provide an English version.