FWI Identifies and implements welfare improvements for farmed fish in priority contexts, particularly India.
Above: An FWI staff member collects a water quality measurement at one of the farms in FWI’s farm program in Andhra Pradesh, India.
According to FWI, an estimated 73–180 billion fish are farmed for food each year, and fish farming (or “aquaculture”) is the fastest-growing food sector in the world. Farmed fish are raised in poor conditions: they are overcrowded and unable to move naturally, which can lead to stress, poor water quality, poor health outcomes, and high mortality rates.
Higher welfare for fish can lead to improvements for industry, the health of society, the environment, and the fish themselves.
Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) reduces the suffering of farmed fish by researching and executing welfare interventions. It primarily works in countries in Asia, a region it has identified as particularly high-priority.
India is FWI’s main country of operation, and there it conducts the following work:
FWI has also completed smaller projects in China and the Philippines.
In addition to the direct benefits of the above work, FWI believes it has had significant impacts in other, harder-to-measure ways:
As of November 2023, FWI estimates that it has improved the lives of about 1.6 million fishes. It also believes that, with its ongoings investments in R&D, the vast majority of its impact lies in its future programming.
For more information about the value and the pros and cons of a donation to FWI, see its website's donation page or this 2023 EA Forum post.
The impact-focused evaluator Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) conducted a review of FWI's work, in which they recommended FWI as a Standout Charity.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: