Trying to be constructive: perhaps one response to this could be for people to support family planning interventions, which empower women in developing countries to exert choice over whether and when they get pregnant. This has a tonne of benefits for human wellbeing and gender equity, and it also seems good, downstream, for farmed animals, for folks who are concerned by the conundrum raised in this post. Some discussion of the general case for family planning as a good value for money intervention is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zgBmSgyWECJcbhmpc/family-planning-a-significant-opportunity-for-impact
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I have sympathy for this. But to be honest, I also think it’s completely legitimate and acceptable to have a big animal advocacy conference in the USA every year.
Unfortunately, I suspect that moving the main AVA summit to Mexico City, or anywhere outside the US, would lead to fewer people coming to it, and less overall impact for animals.
It seems like AVA has actually made a really big and concerted effort to try to spread globally, and are running conferences in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This must take them a huge amount of effort, and it’s clear that most conference organizers in other sectors don’t make anywhere near this degree of effort to be globally inclusive. This is way, way above and beyond what other conferences usually do, and I think deserves kudos.
I’m from a wealthy country in Western Europe, and the AVA trip is even expensive for me. It must be even more extreme for people from other parts of the world, and I do sympathize with this. But I don’t really see much of an alternative. I think the main driver here is simply that the dollar is strong and the US is really expensive.
$480 for a 3-day conference is certainly not cheap, but from what I hear, compared to other conferences in other sectors and certainly in the private sector, this is actually incredibly low-priced. Organising conferences and hosting them is just really expensive.
Trying to be constructive and brainstorm cities in the US that might be a bit cheaper: One random ideas could be to look at Miami, as this has direct flights from Europe and Latin America, and I think from a cursory glance might be cheaper than LA, the Bay Area or New York. Or perhaps Atlanta, which I think is an airport hub for Delta, or Denver, airline hub for the United Airlines. Though I have a feeling that this might not end up reducing costs by too much, and would be a big effort for a lot of US-based people to come to. So I think keeping it in the main hubs on the East or West Coast has got a real logic to it...
I haven’t looked into conference organizing myself, but it does seem like there might be cheaper accommodation and venue options than major hotel chains. Perhaps there are some ‘random’, more independent places. Though I suspect those wouldn’t be in the center of major cities, which would complicate logistics further for everyone.
Overall, I want to express quite a lot of sympathy for the organizers of AVA who are trying their best and working hard. It really feels like the driver of this issue is largely the fact that the US is an expensive place to get to, and an expensive place to be for people who aren’t earning in US dollars. This sucks, but I suppose the silver lining is that it means that when U.S. donors give to the animal advocacy movement, their money can go really, really far when it is spent overseas—even in Europe and even more so in other parts of the world. Overall, I think that optimizing for keeping major (and minor) US donors involved is a huge win for our movement, and if this means having big conferences in the US (which is totally reasonable) I think this is actually a fair trade-off. I do, of course, though, sympathize with the original poster and other people who are in a similar position.
(As an aside, I think I noticed somewhere that there was some discussion of whether AVA should do a conference in Europe. I know this is a bit off-topic. I would perhaps be a bit skeptical of this given that there is already the Luxembourg and CARE conferences every year as well as country-specific ones like VARC in the UK. I’m not sure that Europe really needs three key animal rights/welfare conferences every year(?) But maybe there is a good argument in favor of it...)