Co-founder of Shrimp Welfare Project, which aims to improve the lives of billions of farmed shrimps
Thanks so much Vasco for your work on this! As with MHR in the past, we really appreciate folks doing in-depth analyses like this, and are very appreciative of the interest in our work :)
In the spirit of this week’s Forum theme, I wanted to provide some more context regarding SWP’s room for more funding.
Our overheads (i.e. salaries, travel/conferences) and program costs for the India sludge removal work, are currently covered by grants until the end of 2026. Meaning that any additional funds are put towards HSI. (For context, our secured grants do also cover the cost of some stunners, but HSI as a program is still able to absorb more funding).
Each stunner costs us $55k and we ask the producers we work with to commit to stunning a minimum of 120 million shrimps per annum. This results in a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped / $ / year (i.e. our marginal impact of additional dollars is higher than our historical cost-effectiveness).
We’re having our annual team retreat (which we call “Shrimposium”) next week, during which we hope to map out how we can deploy stunners in such a way as to catalyse a tipping point so that pre-slaughter stunning becomes the industry standard.
We’ve had some good indications recently that HSI does contribute to “locking-in” industry adoption, with Tesco and Sainsbury’s recently publishing welfare policies, building on similar wins in the past (such as M&S and Albert Heijn).
This has always been the Theory of Change for the HSI project. Although we’re very excited by how cost-effective it is in its own right, ultimately we want to catalyse industry-wide adoption - deploying stunners to the early adopters in order to build towards a tipping point that achieves critical mass. In other words, over the next few years we want to take the HSI program from Growth to Scale.
I would be surprised if post-Shrimposium our targets regarding HSI required less funding than our current projections. In other words, though I don’t currently have an exact sense of our room for more funding, I’m confident SWP is in a position to absorb significantly more funding to support our HSI work.
If anyone wants to reach out to me directly, you can contact me at aaron@shrimpwelfareproject.org. You can also donate to SWP through our website, or book a meeting with me via this link.
While hustling might work for some people (at least for a while), I have certain reservations about the start-up hustle culture. More often than not, it makes people focus too much on the hours and intensity of their work instead of the value they create. This regularly leads to burnout among founders, and the image of the stereotypical hustling founder might discourage people from pursuing entrepreneurship when they would have made great founders.
I really liked this section :)
I think this idea of a hustling co-founder means I sometimes have a hard time communicating how "chill" my life often looks day-to-day
Absolutely - as I've hopefully made clear above, shrimp paste is one of the biggest areas in the shrimp welfare space that we think another project could have an impact!
There are a couple of reasons why SWP is not working on it:
As a final note, I think it's worth mentioning that Rethink Priorities' initial research on shrimp welfare informed the Charity Entrepreneurship team and led to our creation. We're super thankful to both and I'm really hopeful that RP's latest work leads to similar outcomes :)
Hey Angelina - thank you so much for your kind words! It’s really heartwarming to see your enthusiasm and interest in our work :)
Shrimp Size
The corporate producers we're working with supply "headless peeled shrimps" (mainly to Northern Europe) which tend to be smaller on average for this market
This is different for example to "head on, shell on shrimps", which are typically larger (and are mainly supplied to Asia and Southern Europe)
As we sign more commitments globally, we'll likely want to supply ranges per producer depending on the market they supply
Adjusting for predicted follow-through
We decided not to discount our estimates in this first model because we're not sure how different this will look in practice between other types of corporate commitments and ours (i.e. comparing "hens & cage-free", to "shrimps & stunners")
The contexts seem different enough (producers, working in aquaculture, who are being bought equipment) that we don't think we can reasonably predict how this will translate
Our plan is that hopefully in a ~year's time we will have had some stunners in operation for long enough that we can accurately report on adherence rates, and update our numbers
Agreed - for me the biggest piece of the puzzle I don't currently understand is the cultural experience... Our volunteer writing the report is from the Philippines, so although we want the report to be global, we're hoping to have a sort of case study (maybe conduct a few interviews or something) on the Philippines to add some on-the-ground context that would be difficult to get from desk-based research alone.
Also, someone from EA Philippines also once told me that shrimp paste is often fed to whale sharks, in order to keep them present in the waters year-round to support the whale shark tourism industry, and I'm not sure how many similar examples of complicating factors like this there are...
Hi MHR! Thanks for your kind words, we're really excited about entering this next phase :)
Regarding your questions:
Regarding shrimp paste - this is definitely something I'd be most excited for someone to work on, but as I understand it there currently are quite a number of shrimp paste alternatives on the market - both in terms of just general vegan substitutes, but also explicitly vegan shrimp paste
I don't know how widely available those alternatives are where shrimp paste is consumed the most, but my current sense is that the solution is likely more along the lines of cultural change, rather than technical innovation (though I'm sure a mix of the two would help)
Though I'm not super confident in this, and hopefully we'll be able to share more insights once our volunteer has finished the report :)
Thanks very much for this write-up MHR! We’ve recently published a “two-year update” post on the Forum, and wanted to reflect on some considerations we think most likely affect the Cost-Effectiveness of this project. Rather than including the below in that post, we thought it made sense to continue the discussion that had already started here.
Hey Angelina! Sure - happy to answer :)
Yes we were affected by the Good Ventures announcement, and our current funding update is actually very similar to that of Wild Animal Initiative, as in:
However we differ in that our budget is smaller than that of WAI, and the majority of it is put toward a single program (HSI)