Which countries should be prioritised in preventing the intensification of factory farming in Sub Saharan Africa?

Hi. Thanks for sharing the model. I’d like to question you putting 32.5% weight on the scale, which you define as “Number of land animals projected to be farmed in 2050 under business-as-usual conditions”. The value of this variable depends on:

1. Current human population
2. Expected growth in the human population
3. Current animal production per capita
4. Expected change in the production per capita

I think that the 2, 3, and 4 are relevant and should be in the metric. But of these four, I’d bet it depends on the 1 (current human population) by far the most. No matter the growth, Djibouti (pop 1.1 million) will not farm more animals than Nigeria (pop 213 million). But I’m unsure if that provides evidence that the marginal dollar would go further in supporting animal advocacy in Nigeria.

Uh, I know embarrassingly little about the geopolitical situation in Africa. I’ll just say that I saw this type of metric being used to prioritise animal advocacy work in the U.S. over the work in Poland because U.S. is bigger. But federal legislation in the U.S. is very unlikely, so any work in the U.S. will focus on a particular state, which might be smaller than Poland. If that state somehow becomes an independent country (or EU becomes one country), suddenly the comparisons shift to favour Poland. But it’s unclear whether such administrative changes would actually impact how many animals would be helped by charities in either country.

There is an implicit assumption that we would achieve more if we spent $10 million on a big country like Nigeria, rather than if we dispersed this $10 million among 10 smaller countries which combined might be as big as Nigeria. It’s unclear whether this is the case even for country-wide interventions. It’s possible that lobbying bigger government bodies is more cost-effective. But is it? I just honestly don’t know. And also Nigeria likely has bigger corporations than Djibouti, and corporate campaigns against bigger corporations could be more cost-effective. But I haven’t seen this shown anywhere either. It’s also possible that campaigns against medium-sized corporations and governments are more cost-effective. AFAIK, we just don’t know. And for some other interventions, like working with farmers to achieve win-win reforms (in the style of Fish Welfare Initiative), it might not matter whether the farmer is in a big or small country.

Sorry for the longwinded comment, I didn’t want to spend much time tidying it up, and thanks for your work :)