Cage-free in the Middle East (Charity Entrepreneurship)

Here is a summary of the report.

Executive summary

Cage-free campaigns are the most successful efforts of the animal advocacy movement to date. On a global level, 2,625 cage-free commitments have been made so far. 1,157 of these corporate pledges are now fully implemented across Europe, the UK, and in the US impacting 220 million hens.

However, despite this global progress, there are still many countries in which layer hens are suffering in the extreme confinement of battery or furnished cages without existing organizations or campaigns. Removing hens from cages is net-good for their welfare: it gives them the freedom to move and the freedom to express their natural behaviors. It avoids many other welfare issues like peritonitis, muscle atrophy, stress and fear. The Welfare Footprint Project estimates that removing hens from cages can reduce their suffering by ~40%. We have high confidence that this suffering can be averted with new cage-free campaigns.

We want to see a new organization working on cage-free corporate campaigns in the Middle East. We have already seen progress being made in the region by Kafessiz Türkiye in Türkiye, but we think that a focus on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt could be particularly promising for a new organization as there are currently no existing organizations working there.

It will be necessary for a new organization to take the “good cop” approach. It may even be beneficial for the organization to frame itself as a consultancy presenting corporations (particularly retailers) with a business opportunity to sell “high quality” and "high welfare" egg products as this market doesn't yet exist, but consumers have the money and likely the willingness to pay for these kinds of products (as they already pay often 2x+ more for things like eggs fortified with Omega 3 and Vitamin D). Starting work in the United Arab Emirates could be particularly promising as the country wants to be the leader of the Gulf States and cage-free progress there may spark progress in other countries leveraging strong existing competitive dynamics in the region.

A new charity working on cage-free campaigning in the Middle East should be fairly easy to implement and has a clear theory of change. We also expect this work to be quite cost-effective, averting ~30 suffering-adjusted days per dollar (SADs/$).

Overall, we think that this is an idea worth recommending to founders. Note that we also initially considered launching new broiler welfare campaigns in neglected countries, but prioritized new cage-free campaigns instead as we think that they would have more promise. We move the analysis of broiler welfare campaigns to Annex 1.