This is a linkpost for https://vettedcauses.com/reviews/sinergia-animal
Hi everyone,
Recently we discovered Sinergia has been making false claims about helping millions of animals.
We believe this is an important issue because Sinergia receives millions of dollars in grants from EA organizations. Just recently, Open Philanthropy awarded them a $3.3 million grant.
We hope you find time to read our article.
First, I want to commend Vetted Causes for doing this. The EA community loves criticism as a concept but rarely likes it when it comes to the object level. This is quite the object level critique and we see how our soldier mindset quickly arose. I'm hesitant to give any pushback on this since I want the cost to doing this work (which is quite hard) to be as low as possible. With that said, I want to
When it comes to Sinergia, I have quite the strong prior that they would be effective. Sinergia is what you would get if you took THL-style corporate campaigns, put them in the Global South where most of the animals on Earth live, in worse conditions than in the Global North, get way cheaper talent since salaries are lower and put in a kick-ass CEO in Carolina. This is kind of a recipe for an effective charity.
For Vetted Causes, I think your critiques would do better, be more productive for the community and frankly, be better received by the EA community if you would first get feedback from the organization that you are evaluating. You don't even need to change anything based on what they reply. I would recommend you use your judgement in evaluating what they have to say if it corrects any factual errors but the rights to the final wording of the post remain your own. This has three main advantages
I again want to commend VettedCauses for doing these. They aren't easy. I'll pre-commit at least $1000 USD to VettedCauses for their next critique (provided it's a serious one) and they run it by the organization in question for feedback.
(I don't really want to engage much on this because I found it pretty emotionally draining last time — I'll just leave this comment and stop here):
I think asking for feedback prior to publishing these seems really important. To be clear, I'm very sympathetic to the overall claim! I suspect that most published estimates of the impact of marginal dollars in the farmed animal space are way too high (maybe even by orders of magnitude)
I also think the items you raise are important questions for Sinergia to answer!
But, I think getting feedback would be really helpful for you:
I suspect that in your critique, some of your claims are warranted, but others might have much more complicated stories behind them, such as an organization getting a company to actually follow through on a commitment, or getting a law to be enforced. I think that feedback would help draw out where these critiques are accurate, and where they are missing the mark.
I just want to add some colour as someone from a Western country (Canada) that has lived a couple years in Latin America. The rule of law is simply followed far less and it is a far lower trust society. However much American companies follow corporate commitments, I expect less of Brazilian ones.
Also, companies in Western countries don't follow the law all the time. In Latin America, the law is a bit of a joke and there is more corruption. The fact that it was already illegal updates me ~0 on what a factory farm in Brazil is doing.
Serious question: doesn't that cut against the efficacy of corporate campaigns? How would an organization ever know if the company was respecting their promise?
Yeah, this is a big challenge in the corporate campaign space, especially in places with weak legal systems and low enforcement. But this links to why corporate campaigns can be more effective than policy campaigns. Getting policy commitments on paper in a country with poor rule of law might have very limited impact because no-one's incentivised to uphold the laws, but there's a decent chance that an international, or niche company with high reputational awareness is incentivised to try and maintain a higher welfare supply chain.
So you might get a high-end hotel chain in a lower-income country that genuinely wants to shift to cage-free eggs after a campaign. They make a commitment, you arrange meetings with them and their suppliers to help them meet these commitments, and track whether their numbers match up. This can work even if the legal system functions poorly.
People in the Bharat Initiative for Accountability (BIA) and Global Food Partners (GFP) are doing stuff like this in India and Southeast Asia. It takes loads of work on both the supply and demand side, as you might expect, which might cut against the higher-end effectiveness estimates, but it's definitely something people have in mind.
People from these teams spoke about this recently on the How I Learned To Love Shrimp podcast (here and here).
I think the problem of entities lying about what they're doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they're expecting are the ones they're getting.
Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn't have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it's possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I'd still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don't seem justifiable either.
Hi David, thank you for taking the time to read our article. You make some interesting points.
In terms of the work Sinergia did to claim credit for helping millions of pigs, it is listed in Column W of this spreadsheet.
For example, in Cell W5: "After the impacts of Pigs in Focus rank 1st edition and dozen of meetings, Aurora published in 2023 the commitment to banning surgical castration in pigs. Alianima engaged positively with the company."
Most of the descriptions are quite similar to this. Note that "Pigs in Focus" is an annual report that Sinergia began publishing in 2022.
Hi Marcus, thank you for your reply. We agree with you on a lot of what you've said. However, we would like to clarify something.
As we noted in our review, Sinergia allegedly secured a teeth clipping commitment from Pif Paf Alimentos (PPA).
Sinergia estimates that this commitment has helped over 1,000,000 piglets per year since 2023. Sinergia cites a source for their estimate, but the source states PPA slaughters only 750,000 pigs per year.[1] This makes it questionable if PPA even has 1,000,000 piglets that could be teeth clipped each year.
Thus, Sinergia's estimate appears to rely on the assumption that without this commitment, PPA would have immediately started using teeth clipping on 100% of their piglets, but that with the commitment they will use teeth clipping on 0% of their piglets.
Sinergia appears to make this same assumption for all of the piglet/sow welfare commitments they allegedly secured.
Note: teeth clipping was also illegal in Brazil (PPA's country) prior to the alleged commitment[2], and an archived version of the web page Sinergia cites for the commitment shows that the alleged commitment was already on PPA's website prior to when the commitment was allegedly published[3].
This information can be found in Row 12 of Sinergia's spreadsheet. Please let us know if there is anything we can clarify.
See Article 38Section 2 and Article 54 of Normative Instruction 113/2020.
Archived web page from PPA's website from October 24, 2022.
Hi Abraham, thank you for taking the time to read our article and reply to this thread. We’re sorry for engaging with you negatively on our previous thread.
The only thing we’d like to say for this thread is that we spent several hundred hours working on this review, and we can assure you that we did a lot of work to verify that what we said is true. We did not just Google translate documents and accept the translations as factual. For the "Brazilian law" you reference, Sinergia themselves stated in their 2023 report that “teeth clipping is prohibited” under Normative Instruction 113/2020.
If you'd like, we can provide additional sources stating this (one of our other sources cited in our article actually already does state this). However, the original writing of Normative Instruction 113/2020 is in only in Portuguese, so we are unable to provide an English version.
Very interesting.
I'd prefer if you pasted the post's content directly into the forum so I could avoid an unnecessary click (plus, the post isn't that long).
However, the post makes compelling arguments, and at least based on your data, it seems Sinergia makes overblown claims. Worth digging into.
I'd love to see how ACE and Sinergia respond to this.
As was mentioned by several commenters on your last article, I think it would be valuable to share your article with ACE or Sinergia Animal before publishing it here.
Sharing evaluations with the evaluated org before publishing would likely make your analyses both more useful and more accurate, I'm curious to know why you decided against this.
Thank you for your comment, Lorenzo.
We chose not to share the article with Sinergia or ACE before publishing it because:
With that being said, we’re open to engagement. If Sinergia, ACE or anyone else believes any specific fact is incorrect, we’d be happy to review their evidence.
While I think reasons (1) and (2) are relevant to the degree of importance/value in advance notification is necessary, I just don't see any legitimate reason to rush to press here. If Singeria had just dropped new claims (especially during/just before the end of year fundraising period), or was in the public spotlight for some related reasons, then there would be a stronger argument for appreciable costs to delaying publication by a week. I don't see any justifications like that offered. I think you need some meaningful alleged harm from delay or advance notification before mitigating factors like (1) and (2) could come into play.
Reason (3) is unexplained -- why do you think hearing from the charity "can introduce biases"? Moreover, even if you believe that, I don't see why you couldn't at least send an advance copy to Singeria a week in advance with a pre-commitment that you were not going to change the text absent proof of a clear factual error. That would allow Singeria to prepare a response for submission concurrently with your critique, and for the reader to see both sides of the dispute at once. Choosing not to do so means that a decent number of readers who see your charges will not see Singeria's response, a state of affairs that does not further truth discovery.
As for myself, I am increasingly inclined not to read substantive critiques of this sort absent either good cause for not providing an advance copy or the passage of enough time for the organization to respond. If my Forum viewing habits mean I don't see the response (and don't remember to reopen the post after a week or so), then that's OK. I think the downside of missing some critiques is likely outweighed by avoiding the cognitive biases that can come with delayed presentation of the other side of the story and/or the risk of missing the other side when it comes out.
Hi Jason, thank you for your reply.
We believe we have addressed your questions here. Please let us know if there is anything we missed.
Do you think Sinergia and ACE almost certainly have no information you don't that could lead to different conclusions or interpretations of claims, in ways more favourable to Sinergia and/or ACE? Do you think there's no room for reasonable disagreement about whether the claims you call false are actually false?
E.g. see Abraham's comment.
Hi Michael, thank you for your reply. We definitely agree with you that there are potential benefits to reaching out to a charity before writing a review on them; our answer to both of your questions is "no."
We have provided more information regarding the thought process behind our decision here.