Switzerland fails to ban factory farming – lessons for the pursuit of EA-inspired policies?

I was one of the people who helped draft the constitutional amendment and launch the initiative. My quick takes:

• My forecast had been a 3% chance of the initiative passing*, with a best guess of ~44% of voters in favor. So I was mildly disappointed by the results.
• 37% is pretty good; many ambitious initiatives (with real rather than symbolic effects) that aren't right-wing-populist have had much worse failures.
• In Swiss politics, initiatives that fail with 30-50% of voters in favor generally aren't regarded as total failures. They are generally perceived to lend symbolic support in favor of the issue.
• I find it fairly encouraging that 37% of a mostly meat-eating population are voting in favor of fairly costly measures that would negatively affect them personally on a daily basis. Initial polls even suggested that 55% were in favor (but as voters got more informed, and as the countercampaign (with ~5x more funding) played out, it got lower).

(* An initiative passing doesn't just require a majority of the voters, but also a majority of the voters in a majority of cantons (states), which is a target that's much harder to hit for non-conservative initiatives. Even if >50% of the voters were in favor, this would've been unlikely to happen.)

Separately, I think the effective animal activism community should be much clearer on a long-term strategy to inform their prioritization. By when do we expect to get meat alternatives that are competitive on taste and price? At that point, how many people do we expect to go vegetarian? Is there a date by which we expect >50% of the developed-world population to go vegetarian? To what degree are policies shaped by precedents from other countries? I think this sort of thinking has happened to a substantial degree for AI alignment/deployment, but not much for animal activism. Instead, everyone is running cost-effectiveness analyses with relatively short time horizons and a direct focus on animal lives improved. (This might be reasonable if you're very pessimistic about large-scale shifts away from meat consumption anytime soon.)

These sorts of macrostrategic considerations could then inform whether to let an initiative like this one fail, or to make a concerted effort to actually win it, e.g., deploying a campaign budget of $5m, an experienced campaign team, plus a data science team.

It was a bet worth taking and we likely learned a lot. We will keep fighting the good fights. I feel grateful to all the people who worked hard on this.

I think 37% is pretty encouraging. Perhaps if it's run again in 5 years it could pass? There are signs we could be close to a tipping point, such as 100% vegan Burger Kings.

I'd be interested to read a postmortem -- why it failed, lessons learned, etc.

Maybe banning factory farming would be more successful if we were to take an approach similar to The Paris Agreement. So we would basically need countries to a) agree this is a serious issue that needs resolution b) take individual approaches to slowly reducing their contributions to factory farming (regardless of whether or not factory farming "occurs" within their country). I know there are some EAs with their hands in the UN now, so one can only hope they make this a priority. 

 

I admire your ability to persevere and use this to ask important questions and learn lessons - personally my sadness in response currently overwhelms most of this ability.

The only thought I have is that maybe we need to invest in EA becoming not just an intellectual and practical project, but also a mass movement with appeal to the public.

I work in US politics and I'm more knowledgeable about the United States, but a few points come to mind:

1. Incremental ballot initiatives are more likely to pass than sweeping ones (at least in the USA)
2. The meat and agribusiness lobbies are incredibly powerful
3. Positively framed initiatives are generally more likely to pass than ones that take something away or focus on something negative. But arguments opposing changes are generally more likely to win over ones supporting changes. Most initiatives fail. 

As for what this would look like with positive framing, it would probably take some careful thought but maybe end up with ballot text something like "Healthy/Natural Farms Initiative - ensure all farm animals live in healthy, safe, and humane conditions"

If we combine that with something more incremental, it might look like "Open stables initiative" "Ensure farm animals live free from disease causing overcrowding and confinement" or "have __ time outside cages." A more specific narrow initiative may have helped against arguments that "factory farms don't exist" which is perhaps harder to pin down what it means to people. 

A series of narrow initiatives could potentially be more effective at eroding cruel conditions over time than a binary yes or no abolish ballot initiative that takes effect in 25 years since there are more chances for change to accumulate and less change on the ballot all at once. 

*I don't really know much about specific policy interventions or mechanisms of change that would be narrow and impactful in the factory farming space, so someone else could probably improve these. 

I think that 37% is a decent result when you consider the difference in budget between our camp (I recently started working for Sentience Politics) and the opposition, who also represented the status quo. For them, it was a sitter. But I'd be sitting less comfortably now.

More than 1 in 3 voters decided that they were prepared to pay a little extra to phase out the most egregious of animal husbandry practices over a period of 25 years.

Over the next 25 years, my crystal ball tells me we will see a mahoosive proliferation of alternative proteins, such that an initiative like this may well not be required anymore. So I think EAs should focus on speeding that process up prontissimo.

It won't be ethics that causes most people to change their diet, nor environmental concerns (overblown as they may sometimes be by animal advocates). It'll be the all-else-being-equal availability of a convenient alternative. Most likely grown in a lab.

As for the animals suffering in the here and now, and where to go in the aftermath of the initiative, I think it would make sense to look at which of the demands garnered the most support, and how to re-package them in such a way to maximise the likelihood of individual success. At the moment, it looks like consumers took the biggest issue with the small spaces that animals are forced to live in. That's a straightforward matter without much room for convolution.

Eleos, I'm not sure that your number 2 is controversial, or that it ought to be, but I am sure that I think it's spot on. Having the kind of resources that the opposition had would likely have made a difference. Perhaps all the difference. This wasn't an exercise in navel-gazing but a huge opportunity to make a, as you say, 'real world' difference under the EA banner. On a side but related note, reading most of the posts on this forum gives me a headache. I'm too thick, along with most of society. We've got to make EA ideas digestible and practicable for the common Jim.

Incredible news. I see two big benefits of the results:

1. If 37% of the voters supported the initiative, approximately 30% of the meat eating voter pool signed off on ending factory farming (assume ~5-7%  are vegetarian/vegans. That is noteworthy.
2. Sometimes an initiative takes multiple attempts before it passes. 

The main rebuttal I see to the "if it doesnt happen in Switzerland then it'll happen elsewhere" argument is that it has to start somewhere. One country can be the catalyst for others.

Couldn't agree more with

In my impression, the most influential argument of the camp against the initiative was that factory farming just doesn't exist in Switzerland.^[2] Even if it was only one of but not the most influential argument, I think this speaks volumes about both the (current) debate culture

In a similar direction, there's more that struck me as rather discouraging in terms of intelligent public debate:

In addition to this lie you pointed to apparently being popular*, from my experience in discussions about the initiative, the population also showed a basic inability to follow most basic logical principles:

1. Even many of the kindest people who would not want to harm animals, believed, as a sort of fundamental principle, it'd be bad to prescribe what animals people can and cannot eat, thinking that, therefore, it is fundamentally not okay to impose (such) animal welfare protection measures.
2. All while no single person (there will be the odd exception; but it really is an exception) would have claimed that the existing animal welfare laws would be unwarranted/should be abolished/relaxed.

In my impression, the most influential argument of the camp against the initiative was that factory farming just doesn't exist in Switzerland. Even if it was only one of but not the most influential argument, I think this speaks volumes about both the (current) debate culture and the limits of how hopeful we should be that relevantly similar EA-inspired policies will soon see widespread implementation .

Is there any empirical research on the motivation of voters (and non-voters) in this referendum? The swissinfo article you mention does not directly use this argument, it just cites something somewhat similar:

Interior Minister Alain Berset, responsible for the government’s stance on the initiative, said on Sunday that citizens had “judged that the dignity of animals is respected in our country, and that their well-being is sufficiently protected by current legislation”.

and:

Opponents of the ban, including government and a majority of parliament, had warned that the change would have led to higher prices, reduced consumer choice, and floods of foreign products arriving to fill the gap – despite the initiative stipulating that imports would also have to conform to the new standards.

Over the past months, a majority of farmers, led by the Farmers’ Federation, fought vehemently against what they saw as an unfair attack on them as a means to reduce meat consumption in society more broadly.

TL;DR: This initiative would have led to bad consequences and the EA movement needs to be more evidence-based when it comes to animal agriculture. I leave a few suggestions to improve animal welfare more effectively below.
 

​​In my opinion, this topic is the one where the Effective Altruism movement is the most in its ivory tower still. Everything I've read on this topic by the EA community, like Peter Singer's Animal Liberation or the chapter dedicated to it in What We Owe The Future showcases a total separation from reality. I think we're all on board with the idea that we should reduce harm in our farming as much as possible, but claims like 99% of meat being factory farmed are just intuitively false to anyone that has spent any significant amount of time in the countryside and farms outside of the USA. Most countries don’t even have industrial farming. It's either wrong out of genuine ignorance, or purposeful scope creep to advance an agenda (for lack of a better term) - neither of which lends it credibility or help the cause reduce harm.

Another issue I would raise is that utilitarians seems to remove their consequentialist ethos when discussing economics of agriculture. The well-intentioned arguments aimed at reducing harm often lead to more harm in practice. The Green agenda is politically ideological and pseudoscientific at its core, and the arguments commonly put forward, not least by this initiative, are derivatives of this framework. 

Take a few of the claims on the initiative's website[0]:

This petition, specifically, makes claims like "A drastic reduction in the consumption of animal-based food is needed". 

"Numerous scientific studies show how industrial animal husbandry is disastrous for the environment and detrimental to our health."

 It is more harmful to the climate than all global traffic combined and – due to the cultivation of soy monocultures for animal fattening – it is also responsible for about 90% of all deforestation in the Amazon. Animal products require 83% of the world’s agricultural land (pasture land and cultivation of animal feed), but only provide us with 18% of the calories.

Most of this is just not true.[1][2] It stems from a conflation between biogenic greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions. The former is part of the natural carbon cycle, with animals playing a crucial role in maintaining healthy ecosystems which acts as a carbon sink. Needless to say, the latter is the cause of climate change, and the shift to artificial fertiliser would only exacerbate fossil fuel emissions, as well as deterioration of soils and abandonment of the vast, vast, majority of agricultural land - pasture. 

Extensive, or organic agriculture shows absolutely no health benefits whatsoever,  is extremely harmful for the environment as it requires far more land, and uses outdated techniques and chemicals which pose a much larger risk to our health and the environment. In fact, capping organic agriculture might do a lot for the environment and food security in Switzerland. 

In particular, the sheer volume of antibiotics used on intensively farmed animals is a serious security threat.

This claim is true, but besides not being entirely related to intensive vs extensive agriculture other than at a question of scale, routine administration of antibiotics has been forbidden for about 20 years in Switzerland, and will be forbidden from this year across the entire EU. The principal cause of antibiotic resistance is its use in feed, which has been banned in Switzerland since the turn of the century.

This is to say nothing of the horrendous working conditions of people whose job involves killing animals all day, every day.

This claim may be true in many countries, but this isn’t a subject directly related to this initiative and I would wager that the expected value of investing on improving working conditions in Switzerland might be limited.

Smaller farms can hardly withstand the price pressure. They have to produce more and more meat for less and less money. At the same time, «factory farms» are shooting up, trampling on animal welfare, routinely using antibiotics and importing huge quantities of animal feed from abroad.

Reducing the consumption of animal products can therefore directly improve the security of supply for Swiss agriculture.

Another argument that showcases a lack of understanding of the agricultural sector. Switzerland can never be self-sufficient on plant agriculture, its geography allows for animal husbandry and little else. Switzerland exports cheese, not pears. The choice is between producing livestock and producing nothing, you can't grow soy beans extensively in alpine valleys. In the future, we may be able to create vast warehouses with vertical plant farming, but that is not the current reality.

This brings me nicely to another important topic that one grapples with in the subject of agriculture. The quote above is a full admission that this proposal would increase food prices. In the middle of a supply-side inflationary shock, the best initiative the EA community could come up with would have led to an even larger increase in food prices.  This alone would be reason enough to be rejected, however the point I want to make here is that this is an extremely regressive end result. This would substantially hurt the poorest in society, even in a relatively wealthy country like Switzerland, and that touches on people’s perception of fairness. Fairness is one of the most important moral axes in human psychology according to Haidt’s moral foundations theory.

Going Forward

What would a good initiative propose to reduce harm in agriculture?

1. Framing - Focus on specifics

The largest critique of this initiative was the idea that “there is no factory farming in Switzerland”. In fact, even the supporters of the legislation agree:

“It’s true that we don’t have a lot of big farms in Switzerland,” says legislator Martina Munz, whose Social Democratic party favors the ban. “But we have a lot of things we can do better when it comes to animal welfare. It’s not just the number of animals in the group, it’s also about how they’re kept, it’s about slaughtering and transportation.”

It is understandable that when the framing implies there is something in society which is widespread and horrible, people’s first instinct is to reject the claim on the grounds that this just isn't the case. On the other hand, if you asked Swiss people if they’re in favour of keeping animals in good conditions, not housing thousands of birds together in disgusting conditions, etc. I’m sure they would agree. 

Why not a series of initiatives to improve husbandry practices?

Perhaps a focus on silvopasture?

How about an initiative to promote the use of food waste in agriculture even more? China is currently processing food waste with cockroaches and using them to feed pigs.

2. Scientific legitimacy, not politically compromised

Lots of the arguments used in this initiative are copied over from the George Monbiot, far left/Green playbook. This means it’ll naturally alienate the vast majority of the population, not least those with the most skin in the game - farmers. Lets base initiatives on the best available evidence. Cows can be an even larger carbon sink than they are now when fed the right additives and with sustainable grazing practices [3]. Let’s leave the vitriol to politicians and work on scientifically sound solutions.

3. Fair outcomes

The expected value from these policies needs to be more obviously positive. We can’t demand a trade-off between abundant food for the poorest in society, and animal welfare as the latter will always lose out, especially in this context of already existing relatively high-welfare standards and high food prices. One example of a policy with fair outcomes here would be to propose cage-free egg production. It’s entirely possible to produce cheap eggs intensively with uncaged, and even free range chickens.[4]

[0] https://factory-farming.ch/ 

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW8BclS27aI 

[2] https://www.canadianfga.ca/uploads/source/006_Karen-Haugen-Kozyra.pdf 

[3] https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable 

[4] https://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/a-closer-look-at-the-cage-free-revolution