Really unfortunate development. Compassion In World Farming recently released a report on the subject and why it's a terrible idea.

I want to make a couple of points here:

1) Since octopuses are carnivorous, a much larger number of fishes will be used to feed them

2) Since this is such a new development, it's an important time to oppose this and try to nip it in the bud

First, I think this is a  really good flag on an important issue and a great first post :)   

As others mentioned CIWF have a good Octopus farming report highlighting the terrible consequences for animal welfare (underrated but I believe that Octopus could live 2-3 years in these conditions). I believe CIWF also presented the report to the Animal Welfare Intergroup of the European Parliament! They have also written to various places (governments, governors etc.) trying to have the practice outlawed or shut down. 

Specifically within some of the key countries in Europe for this, namely Spain and Italy, Equalia and Essere Animali respectively might have interest in working on this. Though so far I am unsure how much either have worked on this. 

However, I guess I’d say prospects for nipping this in the bud from a legislative perspective seem unclear to me. As in, say a country like Spain outlaws the practice of farming octopus (which in itself may be pretty unlikely), then I think a big multinational company like Nueva Pescanova (the company claiming to start the first commercial octopus farm) perhaps just goes to some other country they work in (and they are present in 20ish). 

Further, research labs all over the world (US included) continue to chip away at farming octopus. And if one of the big seafood/fish farming countries in east asia (think Japan and/or China) takes up the helm, which they may as they have both big seafood companies and big domestic markets for octopus, I am really not sure we have the political power there yet (or will for some time) to try and nip it in the bud there. 

A line of reasoning that I am maybe a bit more optimistic about is that perhaps we can nip this one in the bud from a capital perspective? 

Nueva Pescanova (the company claiming they’ll be selling farmed octopus in 2023) has some seemingly poor financials. They went through a debt equity swap earlier this year and had basically declared bankruptcy and then restructured in ~2015. 

They are reportedly planning to invest over 50M euro to create the farm. The farm will produce 2400 tonnes of finished product annually. The wholesale price for the wild type of this octopus product is ~11,000 euro/tonne (p.13). If that is the wholesale price, it gives ~26M euro turnover a year. I think it also takes more than a year to raise octopuses to be adults so they may not see that for 2-3 years, so maybe that should be modelled as being time discounted. 

Then the running costs for the port facility would involve reportedly employing 450 staff (at ~20k euro each that would come to 9M euro/year). It will also take the equivalent of at least something like a few tonne’s of fishmeal per tonne of octopus (fishmeal at ~1250 euro per tonne) and would guess they have to use feed somewhat more expensive for octopus. Electricity sounds like a big factor too given they wanted to go ahead with the farm in the canary islands (rather than having the farm in Galicia, Spain the companies, headquarters, they looked to the canary islands because the electricity bill there would not be excessive). So might I’d tentatively guess they could be looking at millions of dollars per production cycle in electricity costs.  

All that is probably why they are seeking a grant from the EU to fund this first farm. Otherwise they could be looking at least several years until getting a positive ROI on it. So I think that could be a good thing to target efforts against, as if the EU doesn’t offer funding, plausibly this farm doesn’t go ahead. But maybe Nueva Pescanova would just go ahead with it anyway though, and just absorb some greater initial losses though.  

Same food for thought at least! I guess would be curious to find groups who might want to target that capital side of it now. 

Assuming ten pound octopi, that's ~600,000 octopi farmed and killed every year. I think that an octopus is ~30% likely to be as morally relevant as an adult human (with wide error bars, I don't know as much about the invertebrates as I'd like to), so this is pretty horrifying to me.

To those interested (as cited in the linked BBC article of this post) Jennifer Jacquet and Becca Franks are two leaders against octopus farming, and both are in EA farm animal welfare circles. 

Jennifer Jacquet is established faculty at NYU, and Becca Franks is an Open Phil grant recipient.

If you are interested in reaching out, Jennifer and Becca are friendly and communicative and have collaborated on promising EA projects in the past. 

I'm an outsider to this, but it is my sense there is no grand council looking after fish or farm animal welfare. This is it, all the people involved. There is no team B working on this.

Jennifer and Becca are formidable, there aren't many people like them. 

This means that funding and support for new leaders and talent can make a big difference.

I don't have anything substantive to add, but this is really really sad to hear. Thanks for sharing.

It seems right to rank octopuses and other cephalopods very highly, maybe near the top, in terms of how much suffering they could experience due to human farming.

Note that we now probably have some ideas for getting higher resolution information about suffering. This gives important information about the suffering inflicted on farm animals. So suffering might not be directly connected to intelligence.

In the case of octopuses:

• Compared to other animals, such as chickens or carp (who suffer in their own ways), it’s possible that octopuses find the dense presence of other members of their species highly unnatural and stressful, maybe horrifically so. So a farm full of closely packed octopuses might be nightmarish to them, e.g. fear of cannibalism and other aggression might be rampant.
• Though other animals may be very intelligent, it is possible octopus have far greater need for freedom and expression of their intelligence. This might be because they live in an open ocean environment so it’s dominant to have a strong, constant drive to be clever and execute complex plans. Suffering might be nightmarish in confinement.

In the same way that the above environments might be nightmarish for octopuses, many factory farm practices probably inflict unnatural and tortuous conditions on animals, often for tiny economic benefit. 

This isn’t directly related, but here is some background about popular sentiment and one kind of activism:

The Octopus farming event has gotten traction and reception in social media. 

On Reddit (the basis for LessWrong/EA forum) the issue has a 92k upvoted post, which puts it among one of the top recent posts:

In addition to the popularity of the post, many of the top comments are also pro-octopus welfare. The post has are moderate toned discussions that try to persuade or inform people.

I'm unsure if there’s any connection to this particular post, but in the past, several people (near EA, but not funded by EA money) have worked diligently on Reddit communication. 

What this means is more well received, top posts such as this for farm animals. It probably also means high effort comments, e.g. "nonviolent communication" and "emotional labor", that try to communicate and persuade, in a sort of EA way.
 

Over time, my guess is that popular discussion of farm animal welfare might have improved, with less heated, distracting arguments.

It's unclear if or how social media will stop this particular farm, but sentiment seems useful in other theories of change. 

It's also good to know that in more than one way (senior EA academic leaders being the other), it's plausible that EA leaders and near-EAs might have helped moved sentiment.

This issue is gaining the attention of EU policymakers, including MEPs.

On April 20, an MEP from the Greens/EFA political group tabled a parliamentary question on the issue, citing recent research reviews to note that high-welfare octopus farming is impossible.

He asks whether the European Commission can "confirm the incompatibility of commercial octopus farming investments with the ‘do no significant harm’ principle, which underpins the EU’s sustainable finance policies and is the basis for EU taxonomy".

I emailed Jennifer Jacquet and Becca Franks to see if they had any thoughts and they replied pretty quickly:

Please let me know if 1) you know of something I can read to get a summary of the relevant facts (this is really vague, but maybe someone knows a good resource), or 2) you know of ways I can help with this. (Writing letters somewhere? Volunteering some hours for a project? Donating? Posting on social media?)

This news has been driving me crazy, so I might as well try to channel that productively.

(So far, I posted a fiction review I thought was very relevant when I first read the news, but I wish I had a better sense of what would actually be helpful.)

Can one indicate briefly how intelligent octopuses are in comparison to vertebrates? Are they as smart as monkeys for example?