EA - How to realistically reduce most suffering on earth by Stijn

The Nonlinear Library

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: How to realistically reduce most suffering on earth, published by Stijn on July 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary: probably the most feasible strategy to reduce the most suffering on Earth, with currently available technologies, is reducing the consumption of products from small animals such as chickens, fish and shrimp by replacing those products with plant-based meat alternatives, and replacing the vacant cropland (that was used for animal feed) into natural habitat, especially grassland with large herbivores, especially horses whose populations are controlled with immunocontraception. It is not easy to effectively reduce a lot of suffering: due to the 'harm cascade', measures to reduce suffering often have negative side-effects that increase suffering. Here I present a strategy that most likely is able to reduce huge amounts of suffering with currently available knowledge, means and technologies. First, we look for places on earth that have the most dense suffering, i.e. the most suffering per unit surface area. These are probably places of intensive farming of small animals: chicken farming (broiler chickens and laying hens), aquaculture (small fish and shrimp) and insect farming. Most people believe that most farmed animals have a negative welfare, and in the case of a chicken, they believe that the negative welfare is equal in size to the happiness of a human. As a result, most people would come to the conclusion that the expansion of small animal farming is the reason why net global welfare on earth is most likely negative and declining. So as a first step, we can reduce the consumption of products from small animals, such as chicken meat, eggs, fish and shrimp. If people would replace chicken meat and eggs by beef and dairy products, that would reduce farmed animal suffering, because the welfare footprint (the moral footprint and deathprint) of chicken meat and eggs is an order of magnitude larger than the welfare footprint of beef and cheese. But even better would be replacing animal-based products with animal-free (plant-based) alternatives. That became feasible due to new food technologies, especially for chicken meat. In the largest blind taste test, plant-based nuggets are the first animal-free product that outperformed an animal-based meat equivalent. As the production of plant-based meat requires less resources (land, labor) than chicken meat, we can expect that those plant-based no-chicken nuggets become at least as cheap as chicken nuggets (especially after they profit from economies of scale and agricultural subsidies for chicken meat are abolished or the climate change, public health risks and animal suffering external costs of chicken meat are included in the price). Reducing the consumption of chicken meat and replacing it with plant-based meat, not only reduces chicken suffering, but has a few co-benefits: it reduces the risk of a bird flu pandemic and reduces antibiotic use, air pollution and climate change. However, the production of animal-free, plant-based protein requires less land than chicken meat and eggs. Hence, we have to consider what will be done with the agricultural land that becomes available when we switch from chicken farming to plant-based food production. There are five options. First, the freed up land can be used for extra infrastructure for humans. Cropland used for animal feed involves wild animal suffering (due to tillage, harvesting and pest control). The total suffering per unit area on cropland used for animal feed production is larger than the total suffering on built-up land, so replacing cropland with infrastructure would decrease suffering. But it is unlikely that so much cropland will be turned into built-up land. Second, the land can be used to grow energy crops instead of animal feed crops. That c...