It sounds like the benefit under this argument comes from reducing wild land. You could do that without causing lots of other insects (or other farmed animals) to suffer e.g. grow crops and burn them for energy instead, or manage the land to keep insect numbers down. So I don’t find this argument very persuasive that we should think of this as a positive benefit to intensive farming of insects or other animals, even supposing that insects (or other animals) have overall negative lives in the wild. Perhaps this isn’t the right location to discuss this in depth, though.
Thanks for the comment! The benefits from increasing insect farming come from replacing with cropland biomes which have less nematodes, mites, and springtails per unit area, and therefore decreasing the animal-years of these soil animals. I agree there are more cost-effective ways of achieving this. I have some cost-effectiveness estimates here. However, (counterfactually) decreasing the animal-years of farmed insects would still be harmful if it increased the suffering of wild animals more than it decreased the suffering of farmed animals. Here is an extreme somewhat silly analogy which might help. There are more cost-effective ways of increasing human welfare than giving cash to people in extreme poverty, but millionaires slealing cash from people in extreme poverty is still harmful in the sense of decreasing human welfare.
I think there are at least two relevant aspects here—the impact of ceasing insect farming and the question of which policies should be supported.
On the impact of ceasing insect farming, a consideration that it’s not clear to me has been taken into account is what the land would be used for if not for growing food for insects—it wouldn’t necessarily become wild, rather it could be used to grow other crops, and thereby have no large effect on wild animal welfare. Rates of deforestation seem to indicate there is plenty of demand for arable land. Also, biofuels seem to be being held back by land availability and worries over these competing with food crops, again potentially acting as a strong source of demand for land. So the effect of removing one source of demand seems complex, and it seems like it may just result in substitution by another type of farming. The marginal effect may be to affect deforestation rates—but to what degree these are affected by changes in demand for crops is unclear to me.
Re the question of support this gives for insect farming, even if it had an overall positive effect, it’s not clear it should be advocated if there would be other uses for that land that would be better e.g. growing biofuels. So it doesn’t clearly make a “case” for defending insect farming.
More generally, if an action A involves doing P and Q, where P is good and Q is bad, but there are ways of doing P that don’t involve the harm of Q, then the implication would seem to be to advocate one of those other ways of doing P and not to defend A—in this case P = farming crops and Q = farming insects.
It sounds like the benefit under this argument comes from reducing wild land. You could do that without causing lots of other insects (or other farmed animals) to suffer e.g. grow crops and burn them for energy instead, or manage the land to keep insect numbers down. So I don’t find this argument very persuasive that we should think of this as a positive benefit to intensive farming of insects or other animals, even supposing that insects (or other animals) have overall negative lives in the wild. Perhaps this isn’t the right location to discuss this in depth, though.
Thanks for the comment! The benefits from increasing insect farming come from replacing with cropland biomes which have less nematodes, mites, and springtails per unit area, and therefore decreasing the animal-years of these soil animals. I agree there are more cost-effective ways of achieving this. I have some cost-effectiveness estimates here. However, (counterfactually) decreasing the animal-years of farmed insects would still be harmful if it increased the suffering of wild animals more than it decreased the suffering of farmed animals. Here is an extreme somewhat silly analogy which might help. There are more cost-effective ways of increasing human welfare than giving cash to people in extreme poverty, but millionaires slealing cash from people in extreme poverty is still harmful in the sense of decreasing human welfare.
I think there are at least two relevant aspects here—the impact of ceasing insect farming and the question of which policies should be supported.
On the impact of ceasing insect farming, a consideration that it’s not clear to me has been taken into account is what the land would be used for if not for growing food for insects—it wouldn’t necessarily become wild, rather it could be used to grow other crops, and thereby have no large effect on wild animal welfare. Rates of deforestation seem to indicate there is plenty of demand for arable land. Also, biofuels seem to be being held back by land availability and worries over these competing with food crops, again potentially acting as a strong source of demand for land. So the effect of removing one source of demand seems complex, and it seems like it may just result in substitution by another type of farming. The marginal effect may be to affect deforestation rates—but to what degree these are affected by changes in demand for crops is unclear to me.
Re the question of support this gives for insect farming, even if it had an overall positive effect, it’s not clear it should be advocated if there would be other uses for that land that would be better e.g. growing biofuels. So it doesn’t clearly make a “case” for defending insect farming.
More generally, if an action A involves doing P and Q, where P is good and Q is bad, but there are ways of doing P that don’t involve the harm of Q, then the implication would seem to be to advocate one of those other ways of doing P and not to defend A—in this case P = farming crops and Q = farming insects.
Thanks for the clarifications! I seem to agree with all your points.