Aaron Boddy🔸 comments on Cost-effectiveness of the fish welfare interventions recommended by Ambitious Impact, and Fish Welfare Initiative’s farm program

[Aaron Boddy🔸]

Aaron from Shrimp Welfare Project here :)

I just wanted to add that FWI likely significantly accelerated SWP’s impact, probably by more than a year (maybe longer, it’s hard to know for sure).

For example, two of our big pivots towards what is now our primary intervention are a direct result of engaging with FWI:

• In our first month, having a discussion with Haven who convinced us to take demand-side work seriously, rather than a purely supply-side approach as we had initially planned.

• About six months in, when we were able to visit India (we were delayed due to COVID) and saw a shrimp harvest for the first time, which convinced us to think much more about pre-slaughter stunning (we could have visited India without the help of FWI, but being able to benefit from their living situation, and their on-the-ground expertise while we were there was hugely valuable).

Additionally, our first hire in India was through a recommendation by FWI, and has been instrumental to our farmer engagement program in India (likewise, I don’t think he would have heard of SWP, or trusted us enough to leave his previous job for SWP, if not for the recommendation from FWI).

There are probably a bunch of other examples I could give, and similar to Tom I want to highlight my own biases here (SWP and FWI are very close friends, professionally and personally), but it seems hard to separate the impact of individual organisations from the wider ecosystem they operate in (at least for animal advocacy, I don’t really have experience with other cause areas).

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Thanks for the great context, Aaron! Strongly upvoted.

I think the impact from FWI you are alluding to falls under their 3rd and 4th best arguments to donate to FWI, “Tackling some of the animal movement’s hardest questions”, and “Movement building in Asia” (see details below). FWI rates these as less significant than their “future potential for impact” and “current impact”, which I assessed in my post, so my conclusions would hold if FWI is right about which arguments for donating to them are more significant. I assume the 3rd and 4th best current arguments used to be more important earlier on when there were fewer organisations working on aquatic animals, and fewer organisations working in Asia.

On the one hand, FWI’s historical influence on SWP seems like a good argument for their cost-effectiveness not to differ astronomically. On the other, I tend to agree with FWI’s ranking of their best arguments for donating to FWI. I believe donating to SWP is more cost-effective than donating to FWI with the goal of increasing the cost-effectiveness of SWP. SWP’s funds can always be used to leverage FWI’s position in a targeted way that would be most informative to SWP, whereas FWI’s funds would also necessarily go towards activities which are not optimally informative to SWP.

What are the best arguments for donating to FWI?

The following are some arguments in favor of donating to FWI, roughly in descending order of our view of their significance:

1. FWI’s future potential for impact: About 67% of our current budget (specifically our R&D, exploratory programs, and China budget items) goes towards developing more cost-effective interventions in the future rather than having a direct impact. We conduct this intervention research in what we believe is an unusually rigorous and ground-proofed way. For examples, see our recent studies focused on developing interventions on satellite imagery and feed fortification.

2. FWI’s current impact: We currently estimate that we’ve improved the lives of over 2 million fishes. This makes FWI one of the most promising avenues in the world to reduce farmed fish suffering, and likely the most promising avenue in the world to reduce the suffering of farmed Indian major carp, one of the largest and most neglected species groups of farmed fishes.

3. Tackling some of the animal movement’s hardest questions: If we are ever going to bring about a world that is truly humane, we will need to focus on the more neglected groups in animal farming, particularly including farmed fishes and animals farmed in informal economies. We believe that FWI’s work is demonstrating some avenues of helping these groups, and will thus enable other organizations to work more effectively on them. For instance, some of the lessons we learned in implementing our own farmer-centric work later inspired the model that Shrimp Welfare Project is pursuing in their Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India.

4. Movement building in Asia: Almost 90% of farmed fishes, as well as the majority of farmed terrestrial animals, are in Asia. We thus believe it is critical to launch movements in Asian countries to address the suffering these animals face, and to expand the animal movement by bringing in new people. We are proud to have hired a local team of about 20 full-time equivalent staff in India as well as contractors in China and the Philippines. We are also proud that most of these people did not work in animal protection previously, and are now more likely to have careers helping animals even after they leave FWI.