Quantifying the Impact of Economic Growth on Meat Consumption

By kbog @ 2015-12-22T11:30 (+24)

(update: see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EztxZhPQ8Qv8xWe3v/kbog-did-an-oopsie-new-meat-eater-problem-numbers)

I decided to do some analysis to gain insight on the impact of economic growth on meat consumption in the developing world, which has occasionally been discussed in the past.

First I took the finding of York and Gossard (2004) that for every $1,000 increase in per capita PPP GDP, African countries consume 1.66 kg more meat per person per year.1 For some perspective on the significance of that difference in GDP, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita.

Then I used FAOSTAT data on meat production2 and consumption3 from various samples of low income African countries which are targeted by Givewell-recommended top charities to determine what proportion of that 1.66 kg is likely to come from various types of meat.

I excluded dairy and eggs because I figured that all those animals are also slaughtered for meat at some point and therefore are already taken into account, given that these are developing countries. Moreover, egg production numbers are not available whereas dairy farming causes by far the lowest amounts of suffering. I also excluded game meat because its impact is on wild animal suffering, it isn’t farmed, and I doubt that marginal meat consumption includes game meat. Finally, I excluded meat of “all other types” from the analysis.

I also excluded fish because there is no significant correlation between income and fish consumption in African countries.1

Then I used Brian Tomasik’s estimates of suffering per kg to determine days of suffering caused to various animals. For cattle, camels, horses, mules, and asses I used his estimate for suffering per kg of beef; for pigs, sheep and goats I used his estimate for suffering per kg of pork; for all poultry and rabbits I used his estimate of suffering per kg of chicken.4 Even though Tomasik is uncertain about these numbers themselves and points out that they shouldn't be taken at face value, they provide a decent general guide.

This gave me numbers of days of suffering for the various kinds of animals farmed in sub-Saharan Africa. Note that Tomasik adjusted the number of days of suffering to account for the differences in average subjective badness based on how different kinds of animal farms operate in the US.

Here are some significant considerations not taken into account in the model that will affect the amount of suffering caused to farm animals. (Plus sign means that this consideration will cause the amount of suffering to be greater than the analysis indicates. Minus sign means that this consideration will cause the amount of suffering to be less than the analysis indicates. Question mark indicates that the direction is unclear.) Together, they give strong reason to be uncertain about the results of these calculations.

·         Domestic animals are smaller in developing parts of Africa than they are in US factory farms, meaning more animals are raised per quantity of meat. (+)

·         African farms are subject to generally weaker standards of regulation, slaughter methods, etc. (+)

·         Most of the new meat consumption in Africa is poultry and pork,5 so the numbers in these calculations give too much weight to less-suffering-intensive cattle. (+)

·         Marginal African farm production is not always going to be factory farming and may involve less intensive conditions than farming in the US. (-) (However, much of the new production is factory farms,6 and traditional farming may not be any more humane.)

·         There may be supply side elasticities on a regional level. (-)

·         Suffering per kg could be different for goats and sheep than it is for pigs. (?)

·         Production ratios may differ from consumption ratios of different types of meat in the target countries. (?) (Not the case for the 4th calculation.)

·         Consumption ratios of different types of meat for poor Africans may differ from that of Africans in general. (?)

·         The income effect on meat consumption for poor Africans in the target countries may differ from that of Africans in general. (?)

Due to these considerations, I would say that the numbers here should be taken with a grain of salt, probably allowing for a factor of +/- 10 for reasonable but not great confidence.

Considerations entirely outside the model: impact of development on wild animal suffering, climate change, technological progress, global economic development, etc.

Another thing to underline: this is the effect of economic development on meat consumption. It is not the effect of economic aid on meat consumption. Depending on how much you think AMF/SCI/DWI contribute to changes in income per capita, you will have to evaluate them differently. Even GiveDirectly’s effects aren’t straightforward to calculate per donor because GDP here is being measured in terms of purchasing power parity, not a nominal currency conversion.

I’ve left the actual numbers for the end because I didn’t want anyone to take them and run with them without first having to read all the disclaimers about uncertainty and assumptions. So here is my quick summary: depending on how we are measuring meat consumption in aid target countries, and including my +/-10 guesstimate for certainty as well as taking the highest and lowest values of the 4 different calculations I performed, an increase in $1000 to a person’s income will generate:

Between 0.04 and 13 days of large animal suffering (per person per year at $1000 additional income); median about 1

Between 0.16 and 41 days of pig, goat, and sheep suffering; median about 2

Between 0.65 and 138 days of chicken and rabbit suffering; median about 10

Clearly if the answer is at the low end of the range then economic development is unequivocally good in direct well-being respects. If the answer is near the high end then it could be difficult to claim that the welfare benefits of economic development are more important than the animal suffering, depending on how much you care about animals.

Now as Carl Shulman points out in the comments, if this possibility is troubling to you, then you should reconsider why you aren't prioritizing animal-advocacy charities over poverty charities in the first place.

Finally, here are the Excel sheets so that you can view them:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/192J3lQgi7nlsksSLrx9B_NUqqnpfKC1dNa5oF2Fnr9w/edit?usp=sharing

And here they are in editable form:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DUEDkKgsJCEg0vADSm1UPVmsTOMxJe1BpI3D232VDYU/edit?usp=sharing

Sources:

1. http://smas.chemeng.ntua.gr/miram/files/publ_141_10_2_2005.pdf York and Gossard study on incomes and meat consumption

2. http://faostat3.fao.org/download/Q/QL/E FAOSTAT data on production

3. http://faostat3.fao.org/download/FB/FBS/E FAOSTAT data on consumption

4. http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/ Brian Tomasik’s numbers on farm animal suffering

5. http://www.slideshare.net/guycollender/trends-in-livestock-production-and-consumption-cees-de-haan-world-bank World Bank slideshow, shows that most new meat consumption is poultry and pork (slide 4)

6. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1826 Factory farming is the fastest growing type of food production, especially in the developing world.


CarlShulman @ 2015-12-23T00:14 (+21)

I think this whole line of analysis is usually misguided, for reasons I wrote about under a post about effects of poverty alleviation on existential risk (and recently again in a thread about overpopulation) and will now quote:

Say you have two interventions, A and B, and two outcome metrics, X and Y. You expect A will improve X by 100 units per dollar and B will improve Y by 100 units per dollar. However each intervention will have some smaller effect of uncertain sign on the other outcome metric. A will cause +1 or -1 units of Y, and B will cause +1 or -1 units of X.

It would be silly to decide for or against one of these interventions based on its second-order effect on the other outcome metric:

  • If you think either X or Y is much more important than the other metric, then you just pick based on the more important metric and neglect the other
  • If you think X and Y are of similar importance, again you focus on the primary effect of each intervention rather than the secondary one
  • If you are worried about A harming metric Y because you want to ensure you have expected positive impact on both X and Y, you can purchase offsets by putting 1% of your resources into B, or vice versa for B harming X

Cash transfers significantly relieve poverty of humans who are alive today, and are fairly efficient at doing that. They are far less efficient at helping or harming non-human animals today or increasing or reducing existential risk. Even if they have some negative effect here or there (more meat-eating, or habitat destruction, or carbon emissions) the cost of producing a comparable benefit to offset it in that dimension will be small compared to the cash transfer. E.g. an allocation of 90% GiveDirectly, and 10% to offset charities (carbon reduction, meat reduction, nuclear arms control, whatever) will wind up positive on multiple metrics.

If you have good reasons to give to poverty alleviation rather than existential risk reduction in the first place, then minor impacts on existential risk from your poverty charities are unlikely to reverse that conclusion (although you could make some smaller offsetting donations if you wanted to have a positive balance on as many moral theories as possible). It makes sense to ask how good those reasons really are and whether to switch, but not to worry too much about small second-order cross-cause effects.

ETA: As I discuss in a different comment, moral trade gives us good reasons to be reciprocally supportive with efforts to very efficiently serve different conceptions of the good with only comparatively small costs according to other conceptions.

null @ 2015-12-23T23:55 (+4)

If we are considering this as a reason to spend money on other causes than poverty alleviation, then yes I agree. But this is probably more relevant for other kinds of decisions where the tradeoff between supporting different causes is less clear. Secondly, apparently some people do change their causes based on this issue, so even if they're not being rational at least it can help them sort out their priorities better.

Finally, if people want an across the board positive moral portfolio, those people who donate primarily to poverty alleviation may want to know how much to support animal advocacy in order to offset the animal harm, so quantifying it will help them figure it out better.

null @ 2015-12-23T14:38 (+2)

Strongly agree with this Carl, great point.

I wonder if a way to steel man this type of analysis is to interpret it as an argument that you're focusing on the wrong metric?

null @ 2016-01-19T22:58 (+1)

Honestly, Carl, this is one of the best pieces of feedback I've read on the EA Forum, and I thought that from last time I read the original comment. May I suggest you turn some version of this argument into it's own top-level article on the Forum?

null @ 2015-12-23T12:20 (+1)

I wonder what the bundle is here that brings you out ahead on everything - $1,000 to AMF and $20 to Animal Equity?

null @ 2015-12-22T15:44 (+11)

This is a really important consideration, and thank you for writing about it. Economic growth (both for developing and developed countries) is not as straightforwardly good as some people make it out to be. Generally I expect that making people wealthier will be good in the long term, but I'm pretty uncertain about this, and I'm concerned that GiveWell top charities are not as straightforwardly good as people make them out to be (I discussed this in my post yesterday).

I'm somewhat bothered by the downvotes here, and by how a lot of EAs seem hostile toward "weird" ideas. Given that a lot of really important subjects sound "weird" (wild-animal suffering, AI risk, etc.), it's really important that we're able to talk about weird subjects.

null @ 2015-12-23T00:19 (+2)

Thanks, your post was actually the thing that reminded me about this topic and inspired me to try to go out and make some progress on the issue.

I don't think these numbers are likely to make aid bad because I think that aid improves welfare more-than-proportionally to its impact on the economy. In other words I suspect (uninformed opinion here) that the impact of aid on well being is significant while its impact on economic growth is smaller, in comparison to the normal correlation between wealth and happiness that we see when economies develop for normal reasons. So the human welfare/animal welfare tradeoff for charities could easily be good even if the human welfare/animal welfare tradeoff for economic development in general is bad.

I think at least I've given a low enough upper bound on the issue that we can have an easier time determining that certain other far-reaching concerns can outweigh it, and that's an important step.

The only thing that really worries me about the discussion taking place is that no one's pointed out any problems or adjustments to my calculations, and I wrote this between midnight and 4am, so I have a high prior for having messed something up or done something contentious, and I'd hope that people would do more to point out issues with the methodology rather than taking the results at face value.

null @ 2015-12-23T01:40 (+1)

I haven't looked over your calculations that carefully but I don't see any obvious problems.

null @ 2015-12-22T15:05 (+10)

Upvote.

This piece gives a little more information (just a little, not the book's worth that some commenters are demanding) to those who value both humans and non-human animals, and who must decide how to allocate charitable contributions among causes.

I must say that I'm greatly disappointed by the reaction this post has received. Encouraging rationality is more important to the EA movement than avoiding a small blemish on its PR record. The analysis and information you've provided, while incomplete, seems logical and is useful to me.

Also, I don't think changing the title of your post is warranted. Most EAs who care about human and non-human animals are donating to humans in "poor" countries and/or donating to promote animal welfare. Therefore, meat eater behavior in "poor" countries is an important "problem" for these EAs.

null @ 2015-12-22T20:20 (+9)

Thank you for this - I found it to be very useful. While I recognise the PR issue, I think it's also very important to explore all areas when it comes to cause-prioritization.

null @ 2015-12-22T12:32 (+4)

I agree with Bernadetter Young that these kinds of discussions have the potential to harm the movement in terms of public relations, but I'm also principally committed to free speech as it is important for our assumptions to be challenged. I think renaming this topic is a good start on the PR front. I think it is important to realise that in the longer term increases in development will most likely lead to improvements in animal rights as the rich have more time to think about these things.

null @ 2016-01-24T22:23 (+3)

"... and traditional farming may not be any more humane."

Even if my idea of traditional farming is a bit romantic, I still find this hard to believe. And this would be a significant factor.

null @ 2015-12-26T19:29 (+3)

Upvote. This is a very nice analysis, and something I personally have been missing for a long time.

Regarding the PR-problem: it is worth noting that if the EA-movement has a negative net effect on total well-being - for example because of animal suffering resulting from encouraging human-centred aid - then it might be a good thing for the EA-movement to suffer such a problem. After all, if our movement shrinks in such a scenario, this increases total well-being. For this reason, whether the "PR-problem" is good or bad depends on the results of precisely these kinds of analyses.

null @ 2015-12-27T01:47 (+1)

True. Of course, some people are confident that helping the global poor is positive overall, so can be straightforwardly concerned about the PR problem.