Amsterdam Insect Protest

(Please share with your friends in the Netherlands).

On August 5, in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, there’s a protest that could help shut down the world’s largest insect farm. It’s at Teleportboulevard 105 1043 EJ Amsterdam, Netherlands. Read more at this link. There’s also a zoom call on Wednesday 29th July at 12:30pm (CEST) with more info. This is a super important protest, so if you’re in the Netherlands, please show up!

This single farm, Protix, raises tens of billions of farmed insects. Shutting down this farm could affect many hundreds of billions of insects in total. The life of a farmed insect is a nightmare: the adults are not fed and left to starve to death; the juveniles are shredded, boiled, or microwaved; they’re overcrowded so that disease spreads rapidly and natural behaviors are thwarted. There aren’t any welfare regulations for insects.

If larger animals were being treated this way, we’d all recognize it as a horror. But the fact that insects are small shouldn’t make much difference to how bad their mistreatment is. So long as they can suffer, we shouldn’t cause extreme suffering to trillions of them for no reason. It is pretty plausible that black soldier flies (the kind Protix farms) feel pain. Amos Wollen nicely summarized the evidence:

To date, the best and biggest literature review is Gibbons et al.’s 2022 paper, “Can insects feel pain? A review of the neural and behavioural evidence”, which reviews over 350 articles. Gibbons and her co-conspirators considered the evidence for insect sentience along eight criteria: nociception, sensory integration, integrated nociception, analgesia, motivational trade-offs, flexible self-protection, associative learning, and analgesia preference.

While there was, in many cases, a paucity of evidence—shame, shame!—there was, apparently, no good evidence that any insect failed on any of the eight criteria.

Protix is strapped for cash, but they might get bailed out by their current investors like InvestNL—an investment fund dependent on taxpayer funding. If you’re a Dutch taxpayer, your tax money might facilitate the painful slaugter of billions of insects. This protest would gently encourage them not to bail out Protix :).

Investment also makes little financial sense. The industry claimed it would transform the food system and has failed completely. Companies are imploding left and right, but investors are still investing. There’s just no viable path forward: farmed insects are more expensive, worse for the environment, and pose greater pathogenic risks than alternatives. A Dutch newspaper summarizes the dismal state of the industry in a piece titled How Investors Completely Choked on Edible Insects. And Protix has failed to answer basic questions about how their product could become remotely viable.

Even if you don’t think insects matter much morally, we shouldn’t harm them by the billions without a good reason. The insect farming industry has no good reason to exist. It has failed at delivering each one of its foundational promises. There is no reason to keep sacrificing billions of insects to provide exorbitantly priced environmentally harmful petfood and food for farmed fish.

If we assume that each person at the protest adds an extra .01% chance of shutting down Protix, that Protix’s continued operation will lead to an extra 300 billion farmed insects, then each protestor benefits an expected 30 million insects. It’s not every day that you have the option to benefit a population 10% as large as America! If you’re in the Netherlands, Belgium, or West Germany, go to the protest and take a friend. If you’re not, send this to your friends in those areas. This really, really matters.

In justifying starving black soldier flies to death, the industry often claims that they don’t have mouths to eat. This is false, like much of what the industry says. But though they have mouths, they cannot speak—there is no one to represent the starved, crushed, boiled, and ground-up black soldier flies who rot in overcrowded indoor facilities. Join the protest to stop this senseless cruelty and protect those who have no voice.