cross-posted from my blog
There are people who are worried enough factory farms to boycott animal products. There are people who are worried enough about factory farms to buy humane products. And there are people who are worried enough about factory farms to pick up a humane product at the grocery store, see the price, and set it back.
A lot of the cost of chicken comes from the feed the chickens eat, but humanely raised chickens require more human labor. If the United States imported chicken from producers in poorer countries with lower wages, how much cheaper could humane chicken be? Where could we source it from?
Trade issues
Over 99% of the chickens eaten in America are American chickens. For poultry as a whole, America only imports around $30 million worth of poultry per month. Foreign importers have to make it through several regulatory barriers before import is allowed. First, the USDA has to agree that the foreign country has a poultry inspection system that’s as good as America’s and individual establishments have to be approved by the Food Safety and Inspection Service.
Exports to the United States can also be restricted to control the spread of disease. Mexican poultry raised and processed in Sinaloa or Sonora can be exported to the U.S raw., but exports from elsewhere within Mexico are restricted due to the presence of Newcastle disease. Cooked products are treated more leniently.
I think the most promising foreign suppliers of humane chicken for the U.S. would be Mexico (Sinaloa/Sonora) and Chile. Both are geographically near the U.S., have cheaper labor than the U.S., and both can export unlimited amounts of chicken, tariff free. (Mexico because of the USMCA agreement and Chile because of the U.S-Chile FTA). Mexican wages are somewhat lower than those in Chile and it’s closer. How cheap could Mexican humane chickens be relative to American ones?
How cheap could it be?
The biggest expense in raising chickens is feeding them. Chicken feed is a global commodity so it doesn’t get cheaper when you operate in Mexico. So cost savings for humane chicken are going to have to come from humane chicken requiring larger labor inputs and labor being cheaper, with perhaps some additional savings coming from lower land prices.
How much of the cost of humane chicken comes from labor?
| Source | % Labor | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Organic Council of Ontario | 38% | Small-scale, artisanal producers; likely overstates labor share |
| NC Farm School | 22% | Mid-scale pastured budget |
| UCANR | 21-25% | Treats “slaughter charge” separately; if processing wages are also lower in Mexico, effective labor share could be meaningfully higher. |
Mexican agricultural workers make a lot less than American agricultural workers. Different estimates put the average wage at $1.60 in Mexico (poultry breeding sector) or $2.95 (general poultry sector) compared to the average U.S. farm wage of $17.55. Using the higher wage estimate for Mexico still implies wage savings of 83%, which given a labor share of 22%, would save roughly 18%.
Humane chicken from Mexico could be meaningfully cheaper than American chicken but not transformative, and still more expensive than conventional American chicken. If the elasticity of humane poultry is the same as poultry overall, it’s about 0.68 according to this review, you would increase humane chicken consumption by about 12%.
Presumably few vegans would suddenly start eating meat because humane chickens got cheaper, but you might increase chicken consumption among reducetarians who can now afford more of it. So not all of the increase in humane chicken consumption will come from replacing conventional chicken.
Vukina and Oh (2018) put the “cross-price elasticity of conventional chicken meat demand with respect to organic chicken price” at 15.3% so assuming similar substitutions between humane and conventional, you would cut conventional chicken consumed by 2.75%. With 9.5 billion chickens farmed and consumed in the U.S. every year (almost all conventional), that implies the creation of a humane Mexican poultry sector that delivered cost savings of 18% would transfer 260 million chickens from conventional to humane farms every year.
Certification options
Would American consumers believe that foreign-raised chicken was humanely raised? I think so, especially if they were certified by the mainstream humane meat certifiers that already operate within the United States such as Certified Humane by Humane Farm Animal Care or G.A.P. certified by Global Animal Partnership.
If a philanthropist wants to get involved here is where I suggest they do so- pledge to cover the initial inspection and certification costs of humane poultry farms abroad and get Humane Farm Animal Care or the Global Animal Partnership on board with foreign certification.
Become a chicken mogul?
If you want to help chickens there are of course lots of options. You could try to improve animal welfare laws, develop alternatives to chicken meat (cultured meat or better fake meat), or try to get people to boycott unethically raised chickens. Those might be more effective?
But the attraction of this idea is that you could conceivably make money while helping out hundreds of millions of chickens. Philanthropic seed funding would be helpful– but this idea should work as a normal profit-seeking enterprise. I don’t have Mexican citizenship and I don’t speak Spanish, but I hope someone who’s better positioned than I am, considers this seriously.
Cheaper Labor, Humane Labels, and the Counterfactuals We Overlook at the Border
As a Mexican-American who has lived in Sonora and engages in cross-border business, I read the proposal about importing “humane” chicken from Mexico with interest and curiosity.
From an Effective Altruism lens, we should evaluate not just whether something sounds cheaper, but whether it meaningfully reduces suffering relative to the counterfactual. A few reflections:
This nuance alone changes the business case.
2. Labor savings are real but capped
https://ucanr.edu/sites/default/files/2017-12/275180.pdf
Mexican minimum wage in 2025 is MXN 278.80/day (~US$13–14/day) (CONASAMI, Gobierno de México: https://www.gob.mx/conasami compared to U.S. farm wages of ~$18/hr (USDA NASS Farm Labor, May 2024: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/x920fw89s/gt54kx978/s1787g66r/FarmLabor-05-23-2024.pdf
This can cut maybe 15–20% off costs in best cases, but if you pay truly “humane” wages (retention, safety, compliance), the gap narrows. So the promise is “marginally cheaper humane”, not “competitive with conventional.”
3. The local political economy matters
In Sonora, Bachoco dominates poultry production. They are vertically integrated across Sonora and Sinaloa and have been sanctioned for price-fixing collusion in the past (COFECE ruling, 2015 – Spanish: https://www.cofece.mx/cofece-sanciona-a-bachoco-y-tyson-por-practicas-monopolicas-absolutas
Their fortunes are also tied to government contracts and community programs (DIF Sonora social support programs: https://difson.gob.mx which makes this less a “neutral market opportunity” and more a case study in moral entanglement.
4. Counterfactual impact
EA tools stress counterfactuals: would this intervention actually displace conventional chicken, or just increase total chicken consumption?
5. Values trade-offs
I don’t dismiss the instinct here, entrepreneurs should explore new levers. But when you run the counterfactual math, the idea of a Mexican humane chicken export sector seems:
If we want to help chickens, there are cleaner, higher-leverage ways than arbitraging low wages and complex trade rules, like corporate welfare reform or policy change (think OWA).
Note: I deleted my initial comment because I was experiencing formatting problems. This is the exact post with formatting fixes.
Appendix: Fuentes en Español
Para lectores hispanohablantes, aquí están algunas de las fuentes institucionales clave que sustentan el análisis:
Estas referencias muestran que el tema no es solamente comercial, sino también legal, político y social.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I agree with some of your takes, some of which are in the post but some points of disagreement or at least partial disagreement.
"Less cost-effective"- this could operate at a profit and avoid taking philanthropic funds. So it wouldn't compete with other interventions. So even if it was less impactful in terms of welfare, I think it would be more cost-effective.
Existing local producers- I would be happy if they entered this market or if new producers did-I don't think my proposal of export-oriented humane chicken would affect current local producers in any negative way- mexico currently exports almost no chicken to the united states.
Elasticity- you cite the same sources in my post. the big questions are do you feel bad about chickens raised in "humane farms" being born or not? and what is the humane chicken own-price elasticity- I extrapolated from poultry in general but it could be higher or lower.
My apologies, and thanks for clarifying. I’m thinking in terms of impact-per-animal relative to alternatives like corporate campaigns. From your side, the emphasis seems to be that this could operate as a profit-making business and avoid relying on philanthropy.
In real-world execution terms, here are the barriers your proposal would face:
Industry incentives
Politics and lobbying
That’s why I’ve kept my focus on the practical barriers. Big poultry on both sides shapes the rules.
Hey you seem to have made the mistake of dubbing any kind of meat “humane”. There is nothing humane about murder, so although I disagree with this post entirely, I think the very least you could do is consider calling it “less-suffering meat” or something like that.
Spreading around the term “humane meat” may get it into some people’s heads that this practice can be humane, which could in turn increase consumption overall, and effectively cancel out whatever benefits you’re speculating about.
I don't know what the correct definition of "humane" is, but I strongly disagree with this claim in the second half. The question is whether higher-welfare imports reduce total suffering once we account for demand effects. So we should care about improving conditions from "torture camps" -> "prisons" -> "decent". Torture camps are many times worse than merely "inhumane"!
The average consumer (who eats a ton of super high suffering chicken, doesn't know that most chicken is torture chicken, and doesn't believe labels anyway) wouldn't eat much more chicken overall when the expensive chicken with the non-fraudulent "humane" label lowers in price. Nor would enough vegetarians start eating chicken because they're only 5% of the US population and many of those are motivated by religion or health.
More likely, there will need to be a huge effort to get consumers to understand that they should spend anything on lower-suffering chicken, then another to get grocers to not mark up the price anyway, after which implementing this policy could replace 260 million torture camp chicken lives with maybe 300 million slightly uncomfortable chicken lives. (With a net increase mostly due to competition lowering the price of higher-suffering chicken.)
One can object to actually implementing this policy on deontological or practical grounds, but on consequences, high-suffering chicken is many times worse than "inhumane" pasture-raised chicken, so the demand increase would not even be close to canceling out the benefits unless you have a moral view under which everything inhumane is equally bad. I wish we were in a world where we could demand that food be 100% humane, but ignoring the principle of triage is why EA animal advocates, not purity-focused ones, have prevented billions of years of torture.