Mr. Peter Stevenson
detrimental impact of industrial livestock production on health, natural resources and animal welfare
Peter Stevenson is Chief Policy Advisor of Compassion in World Farming and is a qualified UK lawyer. He received an OBE in October 2020 from the Queen for “services to farm animal welfare”. He studied economics and law at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He played a leading role in winning the European Union (EU) bans on veal crates, battery cages and sow stalls as well as a new status for animals in EU law as sentient beings.
Peter has written comprehensive legal analyses of EU legislation on farm animals and of the impact of the World Trade Organisation rules on animal welfare. Peter is lead author of the FAO study reviewing animal welfare legislation in the beef, pork and poultry industries. He gave a paper in 2018 on the role of livestock in driving climate change at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change. He also gave the keynote paper on pig welfare at the 2018 Congress in China of the International Pig Veterinary Society. He has written well-received reports on the economics of livestock production and on the detrimental impact of industrial farming on human health, biodiversity loss, deforestation, soils and water.
Mr. Peter Stevenson
The negative externalities of poor welfare for farm animals
The 2023 SOFA report is welcome but barely mentions the welfare of farm animals. However, consumers increasingly are concerned about poor animal welfare. Accordingly, I believe that the 2024 SOFA report on the true cost of food should include a section on the need to include the negative externalities of poor animal welfare within true cost accounting.
A key challenge to date has been the limited number of papers that attempt to put an economic cost on poor welfare. Earlier studies looked at consumers’ willingness-to-pay for specific animal welfare improvements. For example, Bennett and Blaney (2003) produced a paper entitled Estimating the benefits of farm animal welfare legislation using the contingent valuation method. This paper aimed to elicit UK citizens’ willingness-to-pay to support EU legislation to ban the keeping of egg laying hens in battery cages.[1]
More recently an improved approach has been set out by researchers from Wageningen Economic Research in a paper entitled A method for calculating the external costs of farm animal welfare based on the Welfare Quality® Protocol.[2] The paper aims to provide a method that can be used to estimate the external costs of inadequate farm animal welfare.
This paper points out that “When the level of AW [animal welfare] drops below a certain standard, the keeping of animals for food production creates a negative externality: animal suffering (Lusk and Norwood, 2011).”
In the paper’s method to calculate the external costs of AW at farm or production system level, two datasets are needed: 1) AW score, and 2) costs of AW measures. The first dataset contains data about the level of AW score of farms with different levels of AW and is based on the welfare scores of the Welfare Quality® Protocol as a measuring standard. The Welfare Quality scores are based on four welfare principles, namely good feeding, good housing, good health and appropriate behaviour.
The second dataset contains data regarding abatement costs i.e. the costs of the measures needed to prevent the re-occurrence of AW problems by improving farm management or the environment of the animals to a level where AW issues are minimised. The abatement costs are the costs associated with a set of measures required to achieve an acceptable level of AW. The paper notes that a higher level of AW might also result in benefits through reduced costs due to improved productivity and animal health.
The paper’s method can be integrated in true cost accounting methods to calculate the external/hidden costs of poor animal welfare.
I also suggest reading a blog on this subject by Berk Özler, Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank. https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/it-time-development-econo…
[1] Bennett and Blaney (2003). Estimating the benefits of farm animal welfare legislation using the contingent valuation method. Agricultural Economics. Volume 29, Issue 1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169515003000379
[2] Vissers et al, 2023. A method for calculating the external costs of farm animal welfare based on the Welfare Quality® Protocol. Frontiers in Animal Science. DOI 10.3389/fanim.2023.1195221