Research Report - East Asian Fish Welfare (Charity Entrepreneurship)

This report does not contain an executive summary. The section "Introduction and summary table" on pages 3-4 serves as a functional summary. It has been reproduced below.

The case for working on fish welfare

The scale of fish suffering is huge. While the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) only reports fish in the rather detached measurement of tonnage, calculations suggest that a staggering 78 to 171 billion individual fish are being farmed at any given point (fishcount.org.uk, 2019). This number is only projected to increase as aquaculture is seen as a sustainable solution to overfishing and continues to grow rapidly across the globe, (FAO, 2020).

Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) has inspired animal advocacy organizations to focus more on fish campaigns since its launch in 2019, but work on fish welfare is still relatively neglected– particularly in the highest production regions. For example, Asia accounts for roughly 90% of the global tonnage of farmed fish produced (Yan and van Beijnen, 2019).

Explore vs. exploit

We believe that work in the fish welfare space is still very much in the “explore” phase, rather than the "exploit" phase. By this we mean that there is not yet an obvious, tested, and scalable ask and approach to improving fish welfare - we are still trying to work out what this could be, and should be open to exploring many different options for answering this question.

Though we do have some best guesses and recommendations for how to improve fish welfare and we think that providing these throughout the report is useful, co-founders shouldn't be surprised if this may change once they've done some in-country scoping and a needs assessment on the ground. That is, they should be open to and should expect to explore many options, rather than “exploiting" the recommendation in this report.

What to work on, where to work, and how to do it

Billions of fish are suffering in farms, exposed to constant pain, stress, and high mortality rates. They spend their entire lives struggling to breathe due to poor water quality, high stocking densities, and living in disease. The scale of this cruelty is unrivaled.

Fish Welfare Initiative has improved the lives of nearly 2 million fishes so far, and are confident in their ability to help millions more. We have plenty of reason to believe that a new intervention has similar potential, and we are excited to present our reasoning in this report.

Water quality and stocking densities on fish farms is our best guess of the problem that should be tackled by this charity - this is "what" the charity should be working on. However, we have found it quite difficult with our desk research to identify the "how", i.e., the best ways to address these problems. And so this will be the main question the co-founders of this charity will be trying to answer - the “how” of how to address these problems on the ground, and ultimately improve fish lives. We think a good starting point would be working at the farmer level for one-three years before pivoting to/exploring other approaches.

Unfortunately, fish are being farmed in 181 countries across the globe, with 65 of these farming more than 10 million individuals at any one time. Because of this, there are many location options that could be promising for a new organization to work in. We think that the most important considerations to keep in mind when choosing your target country are:

1. Talent availability: The strength of your local team will be an important determining factor in how much progress you are able to make and how quickly you can make this progress. The type of work you will be doing is largely unprecedented and so you will need to generate your own research, run your own tests, and understand what is happening on the ground.
2. At least one co-founder will likely have to spend significant (~6 months/year) time in country, particularly at the beginning of the charity's life, and so it may be the case that the co-founders of this charity end up choosing their country of operations based on their background, prior experience, and where they would be willing and able to spend long periods of time.

We think that the Philippines could be a particularly promising target country, and that work in Taiwan and Indonesia could also have promise.

Ultimately, the endline goal of this intervention is to improve the lives of millions of farmed fish. We have done as much desk research as we can, but we are less certain that we have chosen and modeled the best approach to improve fish welfare than we would be in other cause areas with higher levels of evidence, or than we would be if we could have visited a few farms in the most promising countries. We are most certain that we want to see another organization working on improving fish welfare, but less certain about what intervention this organization should work on, what approach they should take, and where this work should be done.