Third Quarter Updates

Greetings!

This longer, quarterly newsletter gives a high-level overview of FWI’s programming over the last quarter. We know there’s a lot here so it’s designed to be skimmable!

A few highlights:

• We do a deep dive on FWI’s policy work in India, as well as sections on FWI’s other programming in India and China.
• FWI was recently awarded a $250,000 grant from Open Philanthropy.
• We’re still hiring for an International Generalist and a Project Design & Research Manager.

Have a great weekend! Thank you for all the ways, whether with FWI or elsewhere, that you make this world brighter.

Q3 By The Numbers

The following numbers pertain to our third quarter outcomes:

• Estimated fish lives improved: 159,000 (total: 731,000)
• Farms added to the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture: 5 (total: 71)
• Farmer fish welfare training events held: 2
• Corporate partnerships signed: 2*

*Correction: We erroneously included one of these partnerships, Fipola, in our Second Quarter Newsletter despite the fact that it occurred in July.

Highlight: Policy Work in India

Part of FWI India’s high-level theory of change is the link from institutions to farmer behavior change: Specifically, that by collaborating with institutions, we will incentivize farmers to change practices at scale. The group of institutions we’d like to highlight here are the governmental ones (the other main group we work with being corporations).

Policy work can be quite nebulous: You put a lot in, and it’s not clear exactly what you’ll get out. Ours is no exception, and for this reason we’re currently exploring several policy avenues. And though policy change has long time horizons, we’ve recently seen some instrumental victories:

• The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), a central government agency that develops standards often later cited in legislation and made mandatory by court rulings, recently added FWI India to its mailing list. This makes FWI one of the few entities able to provide comments, objections, and other inputs to BIS’s aquaculture standards.
   
• The Andhra Pradesh Fisheries Department, the state in which FWI works and the largest farming state of fish in the country, also recently added FWI as one of the ~30 NGOs to receive draft policies in order to provide feedback on them before implementation (see picture above).

Though these don’t amount to victories for fish in themselves, we hope that they will later enable us to influence farming practices at a larger scale than we could ourselves reach on a farm level. We also believe they signify the positive relationships we’ve built with policymakers at the state, central, and local levels (and a huge shoutout here to People For Animals and Mercy For Animals India, who enabled many of these relationships).

Farmer work: Preparing to Scale

FWI’s Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture, or ARA, is our direct farmer engagement program where Indian farmers, in exchange for free water quality monitoring and support from our team, implement lower stocking densities and improved water quality (our Welfare Standard Version 1). We have run this program for over a year now, during which much of the value was simply the data we collected and the lessons we learned.

Now, as we look to scale the ARA to hundreds or more farms in 2023, we are focused on improving its efficiency so it can scale more effectively. Specifically, we’re developing protocols for shorter and more efficient farm visits, including developing avenues for farmers to assess water quality on their own.

This quarter we will be rolling out many of these improvements with select farmers at a small scale to test out which are a) implementable, and b) impactful.

Continuously Improving Our Welfare Standard

Low dissolved oxygen (DO) continues to be one of the key issues compromising the welfare of fish where we work in India. In July, we wrote about our plans to test a potential resolution to this problem through feed management. This small-scale trial with 2 control and 2 treatment ponds has now started.

Specifically, we are testing the hypothesis that reduced excess feed will improve dissolved oxygen. Currently, farmers often seem to be overfeeding the fish. This, we believe, causes high levels of nutrients in the pond, which in turn is causing harmful levels of algae that adversely affect dissolved oxygen, making life more miserable for the fish.

This test is one of the primary projects we are conducting in order to set Version 2 of our welfare standard, which we aim to do by the end of the year. Small tests such as these also help to build our foundational knowledge of the systems we work with, knowledge we hope will some day prove applicable to scaling fish welfare improvements across a wide range of semi-intensive pond aquaculture.

Corporate Outreach Update

We are currently preparing for two of our corporate partners, Captain Fresh and Fipola, to trial selling higher welfare fish in November. If this trial proves successful, we hope that it will open the door for a larger corporate adoption of higher welfare practices with one or both of these important players. See our next newsletter for hopefully positive updates!

China Update

Last quarter, our main project was coordinating with our Chinese partner, the International Cooperation Committee of Animal Welfare (ICCAW), to a) better understand the current fish welfare landscape in China, and b) begin developing welfare standards for species farmed in China. We also are planning for an in-person seminar with ICCAW to take place in March 2023.

New Team Members

We’re excited to welcome two new team members:

• Bijja Nagaraju, who has previously worked on various projects in sustainable livelihoods, female entrepreneurship, natural resource management, and other humanitarian and environmental pursuits. Nagaraju joins FWI as Program Coordinator to manage the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture in Nellore.
• Patrícia Pereira, who previously completed her Master’s in Aquaculture and Fish Welfare and worked with small aquafarmers. Patrícia joins FWI for a temporary in-field consultancy to advise us on how we can improve our welfare improvements.

Welcome Nagaraju and Patrícia!

Announcing a New Grant from Open Philanthropy

We are honored to have been the recent recipient of a $250,000 2-year grant from Open Philanthropy. We take OpenPhil’s support of our work as a positive update as FWI being an outstanding giving opportunity for donors.

To learn more about FWI’s fundraising efforts, how much we still are looking to raise for our planned programming for 2023, and more, see our donation page.

• International Generalist, Fish Welfare Initiative
• Project Design & Research Manager, Fish Welfare Initiative

• The Welfare Footprint Project published its Preliminary Appraisal of Differences in the Welfare of Top Farmed Fish Species.
• New investigation by Paris Animaux Zoopolis shows appalling conditions for live baitfish sold at Decathlon in France (English).
• Equalia, along with other entities such as the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, just released Spain’s first Welfare Guidelines for Aquaculture.
• Art installation outside Westminster Hall, UK, highlights the needless suffering of fish at slaughter.
• Atlantic Sapphire, intensive RAS salmon farm in Miami, sees its share prices collapse—repeated mass mortality events over the years couldn’t have helped.