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by Vasco Grilo🔸
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Animal welfareCause prioritizationForecastingCost-effectiveness analysisDistribution of cost-effectivenessFermi estimateInsect welfareInvertebrate welfareLess-discussed causesWelfare Footprint InstituteWild Animal InitiativeWild animal welfare
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The views expressed here are my own, not those of people who provided feedback.

Summary

  • I estimate the cost-effectiveness of paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects is 236 DALY/$, or:
    • 23.7 k times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities.
    • 141 times the cost-effectiveness of broiler welfare campaigns.
    • 51.4 times the cost-effectiveness of cage-free campaigns.
    • 36.9 % of the past cost-effectiveness of the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP).
  • I guess research on and advocacy for more humane pesticides are way more cost-effective than paying farmers to use them more. For example, I estimate cage-free campaigns improve 408 times as many chicken-years per $ as buying organic instead of barn eggs. So I guess research on and advocacy for more humane pesticides is more cost-effective than SWP has been.
  • I can easily see my estimated cost-effectiveness going up or down by a few orders of magnitude. I guess uncertainty would be decreased the fastest by investigating the change in the time spent in the 4 categories of pain defined by the Welfare Footprint project (WFP) caused by changing to more humane pesticides.
  • One may be able to support research on more humane pesticides by donating to Wild Animal Initiative (WAI).
  • Abraham guesses corporate campaigns for chicken welfare not funded by Open Philanthropy (OP) are as cost-effective as burning money, despite some of the ones funded by OP being beneficial. Here are some related reflections from Abraham. I am much more optimistic about the campaigns not funded by OP, but I would not be surprised if they were 10 % as cost-effective as I estimated. Moreover, I agree with Abraham that donating to SWP or WAI is way better.

Calculations

I estimate the cost-effectiveness of paying farmers to use more humane pesticides to decrease the suffering of wild insects is 236 DALY/$ multiplying:

  • 5.74 M insects helped per $. I determine this multiplying:
    • 19.3 M insects affected by pesticides per ha (1 ha is 10 k m^2), as implied by Brian Tomasik’s analysis. I get it multiplying:

      • 24.2 M insects per ha, which is the mean of Brian’s lognormal distribution whose logarithm has mean and standard deviation of 15 and 2[1].

      • 80 % of the insects affected by pesticides, which is the mean of Brian’s normal distribution with mean and standard deviation of 0.8 and 0.05[2].

    • 0.297 ha improved per $, which is the mean of the reciprocal of Brian’s uniform distribution for the additional cost per area ranging from 1 to 8 $/ha[3].

  • 0.750 days less of disabling pain per insect helped. This is supposed to capture all the changes in the time in pain and pleasure caused by changing to more humane pesticides. It is informed by:
    • Abraham, who has researched the scale of the direct human impact on invertebrates, guessing that changing from Bt toxins or insect growth regulators to organophosphates would decrease the total time experiencing negative welfare by 1 to 2 days per insect helped, whose mean is 1.50 days (= (1 + 2)/2), neglecting negative effects on other insects.
    • My speculation that the negative effects on other insects make the cost-effectiveness 50 % as large, which results in the more humane pesticides effectively decreasing the total time experiencing negative welfare by 0.750 days (= 1.50*0.5). Abraham did not immediately have a more informed adjustment.
    • My speculation that the above reduction in pain refers to an intensity equal to that of disabling pain.
  • 10 for the ratio between the intensity of disabling pain and a practically maximally happy life. This guess of mine implies 2.40 h (= 24/10) of disabling pain neutralises 1 d of a practically maximally happy life. Assuming 0.750 days less of hurtful pain (instead of disabling pain) per insect helped would only make the cost-effectiveness 10 % as high, as I guess hurtful pain is 10 % (= 1/10) as intense as disabling pain.
  • 0.002 DALYs averted for each insect-year of a practically maximally happy life. This guess of mine is Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) median welfare range of silkworms. I use silkworms as the proxy for a random insect affected by pesticides given Abraham’s best guess that most insects impacted by pesticides are larvae (as silkworms).

The cost-effectiveness is proportional to each of the 4 factors above. For example, if the insects helped per $ were 50 % as high, the reduction in the equivalent time spent in disabling pain was 75 % as large, disabling pain was 2 times as intense, and the DALYs averted for each insect-year of a practically maximally happy life were 10 times as many, the cost-effectiveness would become 7.50 (= 0.5*0.75*2*10) times as high.

My estimated cost-effectiveness is:

  • 23.7 k times the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell’s top charities.
  • 141 times the cost-effectiveness of broiler welfare campaigns.
  • 51.4 times the cost-effectiveness of cage-free campaigns.
  • 36.9 % of the past cost-effectiveness of SWP, which is the organisation for which I have estimated the highest cost-effectiveness.

Discussion

My results suggest paying farmers to use more humane pesticides is way more cost-effective than corporate campaigns for chicken welfare, and similarly cost-effective as SWP has been.

I only considered the effects of changing to the more humane pesticides on the deaths of the affected insects. I have neglected changes to the population of wild animals because it is super unclear whether wild animals have good or bad lives. These changes are also neglected in the assessment of interventions outside wild animal welfare.

I can easily see my estimated cost-effectiveness going up or down by a few orders of magnitude. I guess uncertainty would be decreased the fastest by investigating the change in the time spent in the 4 categories of pain defined by WFP caused by changing to more humane pesticides.

I guess research on and advocacy for more humane pesticides are way more cost-effective than paying farmers to use them more. For example, I estimate cage-free campaigns improve 408 (= 10.8/0.0265) times as many chicken-years per $ as buying organic instead of barn eggs, which I determine from the ratio between 10.8 chicken-years per $ improved by cage-free campaigns, and 0.0265 chicken-years per $ (= 1/37.8) improved by buying organic instead of barn eggs. So I guess research on and advocacy for more humane pesticides is more cost-effective than SWP has been.

One can support research on more humane pesticides by donating to Wild Animal Initiative (WAI). They intend “to use current and new funding” for, among other activities, “Conducting an analysis of agricultural pest control to better understand the best targets for welfare interventions — first identifying scientific gaps and then developing research plans to help fill them”. So I think WAI is much more cost-effective than cage-free campaigns if a decent fraction of their additional funds go towards that, or if their various activities do not differ dramatically in cost-effectiveness, which both seem plausible. Feel free to contact Simon Eckerström Liedholm to learn about WAI’s work on humane pesticides.

Abraham guesses corporate campaigns for chicken welfare not funded by OP are as cost-effective as burning money, despite some of the ones funded by OP being beneficial. Here are some related reflections from Abraham. I am much more optimistic about the campaigns not funded by OP, but I would not be surprised if they were 10 % as cost-effective as I estimated. Moreover, I agree with Abraham that donating to SWP or WAI is way better.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Abraham Rowe for feedback on the draft.

  1. ^

     “ln n is normal with mean 15 and standard deviation 2”. “An expert friend of mine estimates that a hectare of insect-infested crop land would have between 500,000 (natural log ~= 13) and 50,000,000 (natural log ~= 17) insects, depending on the type of crop and type of insect”.

  2. ^

     “f is normal with mean 0.8 and standard deviation 0.05”. “The same friend estimates 0.8 as reasonable. “The Estimation of Insect Density and Instar Survivorship Functions from Census Data” by Martin Birley (JSTOR link [this one works]) assumed 10-20% survivorship when a sugar-cane pest was sprayed with residual insecticide (p. 503)”.

  3. ^

     “c is uniform on [1, 8]”. “I don't have excellent data on this. What I did was to look at the cost of “chemicals” per acre for various types of crops using the USDA’s surveys of Characteristics and Production Costs. Roughly, chemical costs per acre for wheat ranged from ~$3 to ~$9, for soybeans from ~$22 to ~$29, and for corn from ~$20 to ~$30. I'll assume a uniform distribution between $3 and $30. But this is in $/acre. Noting that one acre is 0.4047 hectares, this becomes a uniform distribution between $7.4 and $74. It’s not clear how many chemical sprayings per year this represents; I assume 1.5. It’s also not clear how many other chemicals (fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides) this includes; I’ll assume 1/3 of all chemicals are insecticides. I also assume that switching to the more humane insecticide would increase total chemical costs by, say, 50% (to make up a plausible-sounding number). The result, after liberal rounding, is a uniform distribution on [1, 8]”.

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Katrina Loewy9
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Thank you for taking a stab at analyzing pest control interventions! 

Pesticides differ widely in their impact on non-target wildlife, including widespread, painful, sub-lethal effects. I think that these impacts should be included when ranking pesticides by welfare footprint. 

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Vasco Grilo🔸3
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Thanks for the comment, and welcome to the EA Forum, Katrina! Great point. I speculated the effects on target species make cost-effectiveness 50 % as large[1], but I have little idea about how accurate this is, and which pesticides achieve a better combination between effects on target and non-target species. I assume WAI is doing research which can inform this.

  1. ^

    This can be thought of as the mean of a uniform distribution ranging from -0.5 to 1.5.

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CB🔸5
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Thanks a lot for this analysis of a very neglected topic. It sounds like a promising way to reduce suffering without changing population dynamics that much. 

I looked at the research by WAI a few years back, and I was curious to know more because it seemed really interesting, so it's good to know they're still working on it.

By the way, at some point, I wondered if the insecticide-soaked bednets used by the Against Malaria Foundation were causing a lot of animal suffering. 

I checked, and if I understand correctly, they are using pyrethroid[1], which is among the fastest-to-kill insecticides. So it seems comparatively ok.

  1. ^

    They're using "PBO LLINs that are a newer type of net incorporating piperonyl butoxide (PBO) alongside the pyrethroid insecticide used in other LLINs". 

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Vasco Grilo🔸*7
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Thanks, CB!

By the way, at some point, I wondered if the insecticide-soaked bednets used by the Against Malaria Foundation were causing a lot of animal suffering. 

I checked, and if I understand correctly, they are using pyrethroid, which is among the fastest-to-kill insecticides. So it seems comparatively ok.

Thanks for sharing! That gave me an idea for a post. Somewhat relatedly, I estimated the effects on wild animal of GiveWell's top charities linked to changing land use are hundreds to thousands of times as large as those on humans. However, I do not know whether such effects on wild animals are beneficial or harmful, since it is super unclear whether wild animals have positive or negative lives. On the other hand, bednets painfully killing insects would be bad for insects if they would otherwise have neutral lives.

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CB🔸3
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That's close to my conclusion as well, indeed.

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