Welfare Economics of Animal Agriculture: Pricing in Animal Suffering

Traditional economic analysis of animal agriculture largely ignores the welfare costs borne by animals, but welfare economists are developing frameworks to account for these costs in policy and market analysis.

Key Facts

Animal agriculture externalities typically include environmental costs but rarely animal welfare costs
Welfare economics seeks to assign economic values to welfare impacts to enable cost-benefit comparison
Willingness-to-pay studies show consumers value higher animal welfare when trade-offs are made salient
EU cost-benefit analyses of welfare legislation have begun to include monetised welfare impacts
Effective altruism researchers have attempted to estimate the welfare cost per unit of factory-farmed animal products

Welfare Considerations

Excluding animal welfare from economic accounting systematically undervalues welfare improvements and overvalues intensive production. If the suffering caused by factory farming were priced into production costs - as pollution and carbon are increasingly being priced - the economics of intensive agriculture would change substantially. Welfare economic approaches that assign monetary values to reducing animal suffering provide a framework for comparing interventions and making the case for regulatory reform on economic as well as ethical grounds.

What You Can Do

Support policy research that incorporates animal welfare costs into agricultural economic analysis
Engage with effective altruism approaches to animal welfare that consider scale, tractability, and neglectedness
Advocate for true cost accounting in food systems that reflects animal welfare alongside environmental costs
Support organisations doing research on the economics of animal welfare improvement
Make food choices that reflect the true cost of production including welfare costs