EA - Two Years of Shrimp Welfare Project: Insights and Impact from our Explore Phase by Aaron Boddy

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Two Years of Shrimp Welfare Project: Insights and Impact from our Explore Phase, published by Aaron Boddy on September 25, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryShrimp Welfare Project launched in Sep 2021, via the Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program. We aim to reduce the suffering of billions of farmed shrimps. This post summarises our work to date, what we plan to work on going forward, and clarifies areas where we're not focusing our attention. This post was written to coincide with the launch of our new (Shr)Impact page on our website.We have four broad workstreams: corporate engagement, farmer support, research, and raising issue salience. We believe our key achievements to date are:Corporate engagement: Our Humane Slaughter Initiative (commitments with large producers to purchase electrical stunners, such as MER Seafood, and Seajoy), ongoing conversations with UK retailers (including Marks & Spencer, who now have a published Decapod Welfare Policy), and contributing to the Aquaculture Stewardship Council's (ASC) Shrimp Welfare Technical Working Group.Humane Slaughter Initiative: This work in particular seems to be our most promising work so far, and we Guesstimate that our work to date will reduce the suffering of ~1B shrimps (in expectation per year) at a cost-effectiveness of ~1,300 shrimps per $ (in expectation per year).Farmer support: The launch of the Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India (SSFI) program, Scoping Reports in India and Vietnam, a Pilot Study in India, and MoUs with prominent farmer-facing stakeholders (in Gujarat, and with ThinkAqua)Research: Working on a number of research projects to answer some of our key uncertainties, such as the Shrimp Welfare Report, an Alternative Shrimps report, a Supply & Demand economic analysis, a Consumer Research report, an Impact Roadmap, and coordinating academic research on the effectiveness of electrical stunning.Raising issue salience: Highlighting the issue of shrimp welfare through conferences/podcasts/articles in the shrimp industry, animal welfare, and Effective Altruism spaces. in addition to working in coalitions with other orgs in this space (i.e. EuroGroup for Animals, and the Aquatic Animal Alliance).As we are moving into our Exploit phase, we plan to focus our work on the following key projects:Humane Slaughter Initiative: Significantly accelerating the adoption of electrical stunning prior to slaughter in the farmed shrimp industry is a key goal of ours. We do this by purchasing the first stunner for a few different medium-large producers in different countries/contexts and in different farming systems in order to remove barriers to uptake.We believe we can realistically absorb ~$2,000,000 in funding over the next couple of years for our Humane Slaughter Initiative, at a cost-effectiveness of 1,500+ shrimps per $ per year, depending on producer volume and demand from their buyers..Sustainable Shrimp Farmers of India: Our farmer support project is still somewhat exploratory, but we are excited by the tractability of interventions we have tested, such as offering free welfare-focused technical advice to farmers via WhatsApp, and promoting additional pond preparation (such as sludge removal) and lower stocking densities.Shrimp Welfare Index: Building on the Shrimp Welfare Report, and our experience trying to standardise a set of Asks across all the shrimp production systems, we wanted to clearly define what "higher welfare" looks like across different contexts. The Index offers an assessment of current practices and provides clear, actionable processes for improving shrimp welfare depending on the issues present in each pond. V1 of the Index is nearly complete, but we expect to iterate and test it over the next year, with the Index likely becoming a core part of SWPs work in...