Firstly, thank you for writing this article. There are some great points in this article. I found the overview of Europe’s animal welfare trajectory particularly useful, as it provides excellent historical context that I was unaware.
However, looking at this from a policy and institutional perspective, I think the bottleneck of state capacity and economic thresholds across Africa is understated. The comparison needs to heavily account for the stark differences in economic development and market structures (something I usually compare about between Europe and India in policy reform):
The Economic Gap: In 1990, the average GDP per capita for the European Union was around $15,500, while Western Europe averaged over $20,000. This is 5 to 7 times higher than Ghana’s (~$2,300), the wider sub-Saharan African average, or even India’s (~$2,800) today. European consumers had the financial cushion to absorb increased costs. In Africa and India, where a high percentage of income goes to basic food, even marginal price hikes risk worsening food insecurity. Currently something already being talked about in India with recent fuel hikes.
The Informal Bottleneck: Europe had formalized supply chains and robust veterinary inspection departments. In contrast, many African nations and India face constrained budgets and a massive fragmented informal sector, such as backyard farming and wet markets. When the majority of animal agriculture exists outside formal corporate chains, top-down regulatory enforcement is virtually impossible.
This economic reality is the primary reason why a country like India, despite having a long-standing legal framework and active advocacy, still faces steep uphill battles in enforcing modern farm animal laws. This is because we never start at the same starting point.
While your strategic recommendations are excellent, factoring in economic constraints and the dominance of informal markets makes a 5 to 10 year timeline for Africa look highly optimistic. A longer and more staggered horizon is likely more realistic.
Thank you, Abhishek. This is exactly the kind of pushback we hoped the post would attract, and you’ve articulated the strongest version of the affordability objection. The economic gap is real, and I’ve made this argument many times in my previous role leading corporate cage-free campaigns across Africa. We do not dispute that Europe’s welfare reforms emerged under very different economic conditions. Higher incomes, more formalized supply chains, stronger regulatory institutions, and greater state capacity undoubtedly made welfare reforms easier to implement. We also agree that these differences matter when thinking about timelines and pathways for change in Africa.
Where we may differ is in how much weight we place on these constraints when forecasting future progress. The 5- to 10-year timeline we propose is intentionally ambitious. Not because we believe Africa will suddenly acquire European levels of wealth or state capacity, but because waiting for those conditions to emerge may impose enormous welfare costs. If we assume that meaningful welfare reform can only occur once African economies reach the level of Europe in the 1990s, we may be looking at several decades (could be slightly less) before action becomes politically feasible. During that period, animal agriculture across the continent will definitely continue intensifying (JBS’s proposed Nigerian facility, World Bank agricultural investment, etc), locking in production systems that could affect billions of animals.
As such, we think this creates a strong case for acting earlier rather than later. The question is not whether Africa faces constraints. It clearly does. The question is whether interventions today can shift the trajectory of a rapidly growing industry before harmful practices become entrenched. Our optimism comes from several observations.
First, Africa has the advantage of being a late adopter. Policymakers, producers, and advocates do not need to rediscover lessons Europe learned over the past 30 years. They can draw directly from existing evidence, policies, technologies, and implementation experiences. Second, many of the highest-leverage opportunities do not depend solely on state enforcement. A significant proportion of welfare gains in Africa to date have come through corporate commitments, producer engagement, industry standards, and market-based interventions. These approaches can often move faster than legislation and can reach large numbers of animals even in contexts where enforcement capacity is limited. Third, we have already seen examples of African institutions adopting policies and standards much faster than historical European timelines would predict. In sectors ranging from digital finance to telecommunications to public health, countries have often leapfrogged older development pathways rather than replicating them step by step. We do not claim animal welfare will follow exactly the same pattern, but it demonstrates that historical trajectories are not always destiny. Finally, from a neglectedness perspective, Africa remains one of the least explored regions for farmed animal welfare. This means that even modest successes may have unusually high counterfactual value. The expected value of testing ambitious strategies may therefore be greater than a purely constraint-focused analysis would suggest.
We certainly may be wrong about the exact timeline. A 15- to 20-year horizon may ultimately prove more accurate than a 5- to 10-year horizon. But we think there is substantial value in aiming for a future in which Africa avoids repeating every stage of Europe’s welfare trajectory, rather than assuming it must.
Thank you for this incredibly thoughtful and nuanced response. I completely agree with your core premise that waiting for absolute economic parity before acting would lock in decades of intensive industrialized suffering that we absolutely must try to prevent. The counterfactual value of early intervention is a powerful argument, and it is something many advocates have been highlighting for India and other Asian countries as well.
Since we both agree on the goal but see the timeline through different structural lenses, perhaps the real opportunity lies in how we design these early interventions. If we want Africa (and India) to leapfrog Europe’s trajectory, the strategies cannot just be accelerated versions of Western campaigns. They have to be structurally adapted to informal economies and local context from day one.
Ultimately, whether the timeline turns out to be 5-10 years or 20, aiming for an ambitious trajectory is exactly what forces creative non-linear policy thinking. Thank you for an enriching discussion. I look forward to seeing how these strategies evolve on the ground, and sharing those learnings across LMICs.
We agree on a fundamental point: if progress is to happen in Africa, it will require solutions tailored to African realities, drawing on lessons from other regions. The goal is to learn from what has worked elsewhere, understand what has not, and adapt those insights to local economic, political, and cultural contexts.
On a personal level, this is something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. One of the questions that motivates much of my work is how Africa can avoid inheriting the worst features of industrial animal agriculture while still meeting legitimate development and food security goals. I suspect many of the most impactful solutions will emerge from exactly these kinds of cross-regional conversations and shared learning between advocates working in Africa, India, and other LMICs.
Thank you again for contributing to the discussion. I look forward to continuing to learn from the experiences and insights emerging from India and other contexts as we collectively try to build a more welfare-conscious trajectory that improves the lives of billions of animals.
Firstly, thank you for writing this article. There are some great points in this article. I found the overview of Europe’s animal welfare trajectory particularly useful, as it provides excellent historical context that I was unaware.
However, looking at this from a policy and institutional perspective, I think the bottleneck of state capacity and economic thresholds across Africa is understated. The comparison needs to heavily account for the stark differences in economic development and market structures (something I usually compare about between Europe and India in policy reform):
The Economic Gap: In 1990, the average GDP per capita for the European Union was around $15,500, while Western Europe averaged over $20,000. This is 5 to 7 times higher than Ghana’s (~$2,300), the wider sub-Saharan African average, or even India’s (~$2,800) today. European consumers had the financial cushion to absorb increased costs. In Africa and India, where a high percentage of income goes to basic food, even marginal price hikes risk worsening food insecurity. Currently something already being talked about in India with recent fuel hikes.
The Informal Bottleneck: Europe had formalized supply chains and robust veterinary inspection departments. In contrast, many African nations and India face constrained budgets and a massive fragmented informal sector, such as backyard farming and wet markets. When the majority of animal agriculture exists outside formal corporate chains, top-down regulatory enforcement is virtually impossible.
This economic reality is the primary reason why a country like India, despite having a long-standing legal framework and active advocacy, still faces steep uphill battles in enforcing modern farm animal laws. This is because we never start at the same starting point.
While your strategic recommendations are excellent, factoring in economic constraints and the dominance of informal markets makes a 5 to 10 year timeline for Africa look highly optimistic. A longer and more staggered horizon is likely more realistic.
Thank you, Abhishek. This is exactly the kind of pushback we hoped the post would attract, and you’ve articulated the strongest version of the affordability objection. The economic gap is real, and I’ve made this argument many times in my previous role leading corporate cage-free campaigns across Africa. We do not dispute that Europe’s welfare reforms emerged under very different economic conditions. Higher incomes, more formalized supply chains, stronger regulatory institutions, and greater state capacity undoubtedly made welfare reforms easier to implement. We also agree that these differences matter when thinking about timelines and pathways for change in Africa.
Where we may differ is in how much weight we place on these constraints when forecasting future progress. The 5- to 10-year timeline we propose is intentionally ambitious. Not because we believe Africa will suddenly acquire European levels of wealth or state capacity, but because waiting for those conditions to emerge may impose enormous welfare costs. If we assume that meaningful welfare reform can only occur once African economies reach the level of Europe in the 1990s, we may be looking at several decades (could be slightly less) before action becomes politically feasible. During that period, animal agriculture across the continent will definitely continue intensifying (JBS’s proposed Nigerian facility, World Bank agricultural investment, etc), locking in production systems that could affect billions of animals.
As such, we think this creates a strong case for acting earlier rather than later. The question is not whether Africa faces constraints. It clearly does. The question is whether interventions today can shift the trajectory of a rapidly growing industry before harmful practices become entrenched. Our optimism comes from several observations.
First, Africa has the advantage of being a late adopter. Policymakers, producers, and advocates do not need to rediscover lessons Europe learned over the past 30 years. They can draw directly from existing evidence, policies, technologies, and implementation experiences. Second, many of the highest-leverage opportunities do not depend solely on state enforcement. A significant proportion of welfare gains in Africa to date have come through corporate commitments, producer engagement, industry standards, and market-based interventions. These approaches can often move faster than legislation and can reach large numbers of animals even in contexts where enforcement capacity is limited. Third, we have already seen examples of African institutions adopting policies and standards much faster than historical European timelines would predict. In sectors ranging from digital finance to telecommunications to public health, countries have often leapfrogged older development pathways rather than replicating them step by step. We do not claim animal welfare will follow exactly the same pattern, but it demonstrates that historical trajectories are not always destiny. Finally, from a neglectedness perspective, Africa remains one of the least explored regions for farmed animal welfare. This means that even modest successes may have unusually high counterfactual value. The expected value of testing ambitious strategies may therefore be greater than a purely constraint-focused analysis would suggest.
We certainly may be wrong about the exact timeline. A 15- to 20-year horizon may ultimately prove more accurate than a 5- to 10-year horizon. But we think there is substantial value in aiming for a future in which Africa avoids repeating every stage of Europe’s welfare trajectory, rather than assuming it must.
Thank you for this incredibly thoughtful and nuanced response. I completely agree with your core premise that waiting for absolute economic parity before acting would lock in decades of intensive industrialized suffering that we absolutely must try to prevent. The counterfactual value of early intervention is a powerful argument, and it is something many advocates have been highlighting for India and other Asian countries as well.
Since we both agree on the goal but see the timeline through different structural lenses, perhaps the real opportunity lies in how we design these early interventions. If we want Africa (and India) to leapfrog Europe’s trajectory, the strategies cannot just be accelerated versions of Western campaigns. They have to be structurally adapted to informal economies and local context from day one.
Ultimately, whether the timeline turns out to be 5-10 years or 20, aiming for an ambitious trajectory is exactly what forces creative non-linear policy thinking. Thank you for an enriching discussion. I look forward to seeing how these strategies evolve on the ground, and sharing those learnings across LMICs.
We agree on a fundamental point: if progress is to happen in Africa, it will require solutions tailored to African realities, drawing on lessons from other regions. The goal is to learn from what has worked elsewhere, understand what has not, and adapt those insights to local economic, political, and cultural contexts.
On a personal level, this is something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. One of the questions that motivates much of my work is how Africa can avoid inheriting the worst features of industrial animal agriculture while still meeting legitimate development and food security goals. I suspect many of the most impactful solutions will emerge from exactly these kinds of cross-regional conversations and shared learning between advocates working in Africa, India, and other LMICs.
Thank you again for contributing to the discussion. I look forward to continuing to learn from the experiences and insights emerging from India and other contexts as we collectively try to build a more welfare-conscious trajectory that improves the lives of billions of animals.