That is a very good point and one we hadn't really thought of.
The agreements don't specify whether the tonnage commitment refers to live weight equivalent (i.e. whole shrimp) or headless peeled weight. My sense is that, from context, producers are interpreting it as the former. We will think about whether to clarify this going forward in the agreements or whether we prefer the ambiguity as it might work in our favour.
Regarding monitoring adherence, as of right now, we feel our most sensible approach is to base it on the representations that the producers will be making to their buyers. Defaulting obligations to SWP seems pretty innocuous for producers but defaulting or misleading their buyers is a whole different ballgame and one that could cost them their business. This is the reason why we always try to have the buyers being party to the agreements stating that they will prioritise stunned shrimp.
Thanks for your interest in shrimp welfare and I hope this addresses your questions.
First and foremost, I want to express my deep gratitude to @MHR, @MarcusAbramovitch and @Aaron Bergman for kickstarting this discussion in the EA Forum. As mentioned in the post, this is currently SWP’s most cost-effective programme and one that we are very keen to continue to scale in the coming few years. To achieve that, we expect to rely on the support of our existing donors but also on that of the EA Community at large.
Second, we couldn’t have asked for a better way to get the conversation started than for a third party to look at our programme in such depth and to put it to the community for consideration in an impartial way.
Finally, I want it to be clear that my comments should not be interpreted as a negative reaction to the post but quite the opposite. It would have been nearly impossible to do a better job at portraying and evaluating our programme without further ‘insider intel’ which I hope to provide a bit of here.
Thank you!
In the coming days, we might have some more feedback on the specific assumptions made in the post but I wanted to make some clarifications as early as possible:
FUNDING
OVERALL PROGRAMME
COST-EFFECTIVENESS ESTIMATES
I'm really looking forward to hearing more about the TII and how other orgs might support or collaborate with you.
James, thank you very much for writing this thoughtful post! It presents the argument in simple but powerful ways.
Edo and Amber, thanks a lot for writing this. I really enjoyed looking back at when my co-founder and I launched SWP!
I'm happy to chat with anyone interested in discussing this process further. My email is andres@shrimpwelfareproject.org
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply so thoughtfully! will definitely look into these resources.
Ben, this is super helpful! Thank you very much for publishing. Any chance you have come across something related to managing/coping with work addiction?
Haven (and FWI team), I wanted to publicly thank you for the great work you are doing, both directly and indirectly (including the continuous mentorship we at Shrimp Welfare Project kindly benefit from). Keep up this level of transparency, it is invaluable for other EAA organizations working with aquatic animals in Asia and elsewhere.
I actually don't think that we would be overestimating. Your original intuition was correct.
The way it works in practice is that buyers ask for a certain size of shrimp (e.g. 14g). This is always quoted in live weight equivalent. Then comes the second criterion of being peeled, etc. This normally means that somewhere between 35-50% of the weight is lost. If we just use 50% for simplicity purposes, there are two possible scenarios:
Hope this clarifies the issue.