Is it time for development economists to start considering the welfare of non-human animals?
Here is an interesting article by a development economist at the World Bank. I thought that people in both the global development and animal welfare space might find it interesting, as it deals with the links between the two sectors:
No we should not limit development of poor countries because we’re worried about them building up their factory farm industries.
There’s a lot of moral uncertainty when comparing animal and human welfare, so that utility calculus will almost always be a dead end. Meanwhile what we can be quite certain of is that limiting global development will be really harmful to the people in those developing countries. It would also look very hypocritical for rich countries to turn around and tell poor countries they shouldn’t develop because of animal rights and therefore damaging to the relationship between developing countries and development economists.
It’s a no from me.