EA - Linkpost: Big Wins for Farm Animals This Decade by James Ozden

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Linkpost: Big Wins for Farm Animals This Decade, published by James Ozden on January 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note: I'm cross-posting the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter, written by Lewis Bollard (with his permission). You can sign up to receive this newsletter here. I'm sharing this because I think provides some great analysis of farm animal wins in the past decade, across a range of theories of change.Progress for farm animals has been far too slow. In 1822, Britain passed the first national law protecting farm animals. Two centuries later, most countries — including China and the United States — still lack such a law. In 1975, Peter Singer published Animal Liberation. Half a century later, about ten times more animals are factory farmed every year.But in the last decade, advocates have achieved unprecedented progress for farm animals. For the holidays, I want to step back and reflect on everything you’ve achieved — and much of it was achieved by readers of this newsletter — to start to turn the tide for farm animals.Corporate ChangeA decade ago, most of the world’s largest food corporations lacked even a basic farm animal welfare policy. Today, they almost all have one. That’s thanks to advocates, who won about 3,000 new corporate policies in the last ten years.Take the battery cage. About seven billion birds, or roughly one for every human on the planet, are crammed into these microwave-sized containers. A decade ago, Europe had just moved to slightly larger enriched cages, and US advocates were pushing for a similar reform. Abolishing cages altogether seemed impossible. That changed in 2015-18, as advocates secured cage-free pledges from almost all of the largest American and European retailers, fast food chains, and foodservice companies. Advocates then extended this work globally, securing major pledges from Brazil to Thailand.Most recently, advocates won the first global cage-free pledges from 150 multinationals, including the world’s largest hotel chains and food manufacturers.A major question was whether these companies would follow through on their pledges. So far, almost 1,000 companies have — that’s 88% of the companies that promised to go cage-free by the end of last year. Another 75% of the world’s largest food companies are now publicly reporting on their progress in going cage-free. Of course, some companies will still shirk their pledges. But 165M more hens are already cage-free in Europe and the US today than were a decade ago, and advocates are on track to help over 300M more just by getting companies to follow through on their existing policiesAlternative Protein AccelerationIn 2012, alternative proteins were decidedly “alternative.” No major meat company was making plant-based meat, no major US fast food chain was serving it, cultured meat hadn’t yet been cultured, Beyond Meat hadn’t gotten beyond Whole Foods, and Impossible burgers weren’t yet possible.Today, the world’s largest meat companies — from Brazil’s JBS to America’s Tyson Foods — mostly have their own plant-based meat brands. Germany’s biggest meat producer said this year that half of its future product range will be meatless. One of the world’s largest seafood companies, Thai Union, even launched plant-based seafood.The world’s largest fast food chains now mostly have a plant-based option — with one noticeable McException. Yum Brands, owner of KFC and Pizza Hut, calls plant-based foods “part of a global movement influencing menus at all of our restaurants.” Burger King is selling plant-based whoppers at most of its global locations; in Belgium, they now account for one in three whoppers sold.Even after a bad year, plant-based meat sales are more than twice what they were five years ago. Alternative protein startups have raised a “mere...