 Head in without further ado in today's topic, we're going to talk about animal welfare, public opinion seems more and more sensitive today to the cause. But what do we actually know about the economics of animal welfare. We have two experts with us today, Nicola Trèche and Romain Espinoza. Nicola and Romain are going to help us to take a closer look at the issue. Nicola Trèche welcome you had you hold a joint senior research position here at TSC joint with the INRAE, which for those who are not in France and perhaps don't know is France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, food and environment. We are also associated with the IST, which is our sister Institute for Pluridisciplinary Research here in Toulouse, and you work on risk and decision theory, environmental economics, benefit cost analysis, and more recently animal welfare. In France you're quite well known as I think you can correct me but I think two years ago you launched in France with a colleague, the very popular Lundiver, which in English means the green Monday, which is an initiative which has been very popular to encourage citizens to skip meat once a week for health and economic reasons. Perhaps we'll hear more about that later. Welcome, Romain you're a researcher in economics at the French National Scientific Research Center as we know here in France as the CNRS, you're based at the University of Rennes, and you have specialized in decision making mechanisms and experimental methods. Your work focuses on plant nutrition and the animal condition, food choices, cognitive biases, political and social preferences. You wrote a book recently on how to save animals in economic theory of animal welfare with the poof poof publishing house. In 2019-20 you are also a visitor here with us at TSC and IST so we're happy to have you back with us today. I will give you the floor now that's enough for me, over to you both of you for 20 minutes introduction to today's topic. Thanks. Okay, thanks a lot, Jennifer from the very nice introduction, can you all see my screen that's okay. I can. So I guess if I can everyone else can. So hello everyone thank you for being here today so I'm very pleased to present today and to introduce some of our works with Nicola. It's been a few years we've been working on animal welfare as economists. So today we will give you a small overview of the challenges that we have when we talk about animal use and somehow what we can do to improve social welfare regarding animal welfare. So first of all, so today's talk will be divided into two parts. First we will discuss briefly the externalities associated with misconception and margin animal use. So externalities for those who are not economists are arise whenever the decision of one person to consume a good or to make some action generates either positive or negative impacts on the utility of others. So here for instance for regarding animal welfare. Whenever we so whenever we engage in animal use, it has an impact, not only on the person on the consumer, but also on the animals. Of course, our health on the environment. So we briefly discussed that, and then we will see how we can reduce the negative externalities associated with animal use. So we will talk about the importance of ignorance information, the challenge of cognitive dissonance, how NGO can engage in the topic, as well as new market solutions such as a culture needs. So first of all to introduce the topic we like to make a small question small poll to to you, Jennifer, I think you have a question. Thank you, just a quick note to yourself we can't see you be very nice to see you if you could put your video on for us also that would be fantastic. In the meantime, the first question for the audience today please to feel free to reply how many terrestrial farm animals do you think are killed each year worldwide. Would that be 700 million, 7 billion or 70 billion, please click to answer the first question. We'll give you just a few seconds to finish that. And I think our technical team there we go here's the results of the poll. So, Nicola Roman, can I let you perhaps comment the replies other 35 or 69% of people right to say 70 billion. So actually there are. So I'm sorry just either my video on my screen. So actually they're quite so the majority of their participants today have right. We have about 70 billion animals that are killed each year worldwide. So as you can see here on the screen, those are data from the FAO which is the UN organization for relating to food and agriculture. The vast majority of animals killed are chicken. They represent about 69 billion animals kills every year. And at the lower end of the spectrum very very far away. We also have pigs, turkey, sheep, goats and cattle. And all together those categories account about 1 billion animals killed yearly. So chicken, the main issue that we have regarding animal welfare is that chicken, for instance, in Western countries are raised mostly in industrial farms with a very high density of animals per square meter without access to outdoors. So quite bad, we're in conditions for them. We also have pigs, which is becoming quite popular in countries like China also. Those pigs are also raised in intensive farms for most of them, which is also a big challenge for animal welfare. And finally, the animals maybe were the most used to cattle. Of course they are so those animals maybe have the best living conditions today, but they are constitute the minor very small minority of animals killed. So total consumption of meat. So the consumption per capita has increased a lot because it's strongly related to the economic development. So as you can see here today's picture, the largest consumer for meat is North America, some countries in South America as well, Europe. And China has increased a lot in the past decade with, of course, economic development. So almost all countries follow this pattern, except maybe India, because of cultural reasons where you have a high share of vegetarian. So that's why the projection in the in the middle run are quite alarming regarding the number of animals killed because the as a developing countries are expected to grow. The more we are expecting to kill animals. What we can see also is that there is a discrepancy between the number of animals killed and the number of animals suffering and how much we invest in helping those animals. So here are some figures from the United States. On the left hand side you have a graph about the number of animals that are either killed or used in the US. So as you can see, most of them in the US are farmed animals, which is not surprising. Only a tiny proportion of them are either labs, I mean, animals used in lab for experiments, or I mostly shelters, like dogs or cats that are the size. But here on the right hand side what you have is the money given to this charity. And in green you have so the amount of the share of money that is given to shelters. And here in like you, you have the share of money given to farm animals. And as you can see, while farm animals represent the great majority of animals used and killed. They represent only a very small minority of the funds for animal charities. So just to give you one number about this figure for one cat or dog, ethnicizing the US we have 3400 farm animals that are killed. So there is a strong discrepancy between the two. And animal use also I mean meat consumption also has an impact, an externality on the health system, because people eat maybe too much meat, too few fruits and vegetables. We have a lot of disease that origin that occur. It has cost for the burden for the global health system. And here I just give you a few figures, there are many papers about about that, but here are figures from a PNS in 2016, where they compare they look at how many death could be avoided. If we change our diet, either for health or get, sorry, healthy guidelines, healthy guidelines, that is to say reducing red meat and increasing foods and vegetables, vegetarian diet or vegan diet. So as you can see, all countries in all regions in the world, sorry, would benefit from the change, the increase in vegetable and the decrease in red meat consumption. So red meat is considered as considered by the World Health Organization. That's why you have here in orange, the reduction in death due to the reduction in red meat. But of course, shifting to plant-based diets, it has two sides of the same coin. The first side is the benefits from reducing meat, and the other side is the benefits associated with the increase in foods and vegetables. So this is true for all countries in the world, and especially in developed countries where we eat too much meat, but also in the long run for developing countries where they tend to greatly increase their meat consumption in the past few years. So now Nicolae, did you have a few words about the environment? Yes. Thank you, Roman, and hello everyone. So I'm starting to talk about the environmental impacts of food products by showing you this figure, which is circulating a lot on social media in particular. So it's taken from poor NMSS paper published in Science in 2018. It's probably the most comprehensive study about the impacts of food on the environment. So here you see on the y-axis a number of food products, and on the x-axis you have greenhouse gases emissions per kilo of the product. And in the paper they examine five environmental dimensions, so here I'm just showing one dimension, which is climate change. And the main result of this paper is that there is striking difference between animal products and plant-based products. Another interesting result from this study is that as we do a life cycle analysis, we can see the respective contribution of each part of the production process. And you can see on the figure that the green part, land use change, and the farm part especially with methane emissions and also nitrous oxide emissions are by far the largest contributor here. And in contrast, for instance, transport does not contribute much. It's less than 5% of emissions on average. So that suggests, for instance, that buying locally is not really as efficient as just changing diets toward more plant-based food. On the next screen on the left, you have again contrast between animal food in red and plant-based food in green with respect to their contribution to different benefit and costs, let's say. So on the human nutrition side, you see that animal products only represent a small part of the calories, higher part if we look at protein intake, for instance. But if we go at, if we look at the social cost or external cost or externalities, then the share is much higher. You see the red part is much more important. For instance, animal products represent about 80% of agricultural land. It's about two-thirds of greenhouse-resistant emissions and also water pollution and soil pollution and it's essentially all zoonotic risk or antibiotic use. On the right figure, it's about air pollution. As you know, air pollution is probably the number one environmental issue. Recent studies have shown both in the US and in Europe that now agriculture and especially animal agriculture is the main contributor to air pollution. Here this figure takes data from a PNAS study published a year ago and it computes the cost-benefit ratio. So the cost is monetized mortality effect from air pollution and the benefit is an economic value added of each sector of the American economy. And you see that the highest ratios of the worst ratio is that of animal production and aqua-culture, much above all the other ratios of the different sectors of the American economy. Okay. Thank you very much, Nicolas. So more globally we've seen that there are three types of negative externalities associated with meat consumption. First on animal welfare, second on the health system and finally on the environment. So the next question is what can we do? What kind of strategies can we implement to reduce those negative externalities? The first question that we can have that we should deal with is the question of what we call sincere ignorance. So there is a strong difference, discrepancy I would say between what we see, what animals in the farming industry live. On the left hand side you can see by definition the animals you have access to, you have direct knowledge of animals for which everything is going quite well. By definition if you can see them they have access to outdoors and they have here on the picture there is low density of animals. And they get to for instance natural light and so on. So those are animals for which everything is going quite well. On the other hand we know that most of the production is currently done in intensive farms where there is high density of animals. There is for instance genetic selection to select animals that have a rapid gain in weight for instance. Also you have no outdoor access, you have no natural light here and so on. So there is a discrepancy between what we see and what most of the animals live, which may actually give yields to incorrect beliefs about what the average animal in the farming industry experiences. So in the first work, I mean with my co-author Jan Stoop, we tried to investigate to which extent people are really ignorant about what happens with animals or whether they are just sincerely ignorant about that. So we made up an experiment where we tried to assess the impact of information campaigns on three topics. First it relates to animal welfare, so animal-based diet, sorry, second about the negative consequences of alcohol consumption and finally some questions relating to immigration. So we simulate an information campaign with UK nationals. Basically we obtain the fact that informing people about the negative externalities associated with animal-based diets improves the knowledge of people. Here in our experiment about 20 percentage points in the same almost the same way as for alcohol consumption. For inner experiments with immigration, it has a strong information campaign had a stronger impact. So the two key messages that we find in this paper is that first there is some sincere environments, people are receptive to some information regarding animal, the externalities of animal-based consumption. The second message that we also find is that there is also information resistance. So only for animal-based diets, we find that some participants consciously or unconsciously refuse to acquire new information regarding animal-based diets when we find no such effect for alcohol or immigration. So in this paper written with Nina and Eve, we also had a study of psychology of food habits, let's say. We focus on what has been coined in psychology, the meat paradox. So what is the meat paradox? It's this idea that there is a sort of psychological cost. It's an hypothesis, psychological cost associated with meat consumption. For the following reason, because on the one hand, consumers in general may like animals as shown on the picture, for instance, or at least they may not like to feel responsible for the suffering and the death of animals. And on the other hand, they eat meat. And so that sounds a bit inconsistent and that people may feel disturbed, they may feel cognitive dissonance associated with that. So they may want to reduce that cost. If we see it as a cost, for instance, they may want to change their consumption habits. But the problem is that it's difficult to change our food habits. There is a lot of resistance and we like eating meat. So another direction, which is really the core of cognitive dissonance, is to try to adjust our beliefs. For instance, we may as just discussed by a woman, we may ignore information or misinterpret information or find excuses or justifications. And this is what we explore theoretically. So to do that, we use a cognitive dissonance model by Roland Benabu and Jean Tirol that we apply to the construction of meat. And we find a set of results. So one result when we do comparative statistics analysis that we find is that if we increase the parameter that controls the taste for meat, then we can see that there is a higher demand for self-deception because the person eats more meat, and thus he has higher need for adjusting his or her beliefs. We also explore the effect of external parameters. For instance, the effect of price. So if we increase the price of meat, we can show that there is a direct impact on the belief. So price affect beliefs. Why is that because the price affect consumption and by a reduced increasing price reduces meat consumption so reduces the need for self-deception. And so, and so as a consequence, it increases the price, the price elasticity of meat consumption. In the next study, so with Roland, we focused on the impact of NGO, animal advocacy NGOs are really central to explain what's going on in the issues regarding animal protection. And it turns out that there is often quite a sharp difference between different types of NGOs. There are like some so-called moderate NGO or wild forest NGO, which, which recommend to let's say reduce meat consumption increase plant-based food in consumption or they recommend to improve animal welfare. And at the end of the spectrum, you have like more abolitionist radical NGO criticize the exploitation of animals and recommend to go toward the vegan vegan world. We should stop eating meat consumption eating meat. And so we try to explore the efficiency of these messages by wild forest and abolitionist NGO, both on beliefs on pro meat justification to see whether this reduce this justification and also on actions. So we looked at the donation to animal advocacy association and also at the petition signature. And what we found is that in general both messages both wild forest and abolitionist message change beliefs reduce pro meat justifications. But, and that was a bit of a surprise to us, it did not affect the in the welfare case actions and besides even backfire the regarding the abolitionist message means that when we exposed participants to an abolitionist message stop meat consumption it reduced the compared to the control their willingness to help animals. So I think now we have a second, second question. Okay, yep. Thank you, Nicola. I think you know this we still can't see you I presume you have a problem with your video I'm hopefully we may be able to see you before the end of the session. The second question here for us now, which in your opinion is the first country to have authorized the sale of cultured meat Singapore, China, Taiwan, or perhaps you do not know what cultured meat is over to you. Okay, I think we may have had enough time to think about it. A few more seconds. Here we go. Okay, we seem to have a majority of people 62.62% thinking it may be Singapore Nicola, Omar. Is that correct. Yes, it is correct. Culture meat so it was culture chicken was authorized by a safety agency for the first time in December 2020 so three months ago in Singapore. It was that was the first time and the only time so far where culture meat product was commercialized. And it's actually sold in one restaurant in Singapore nowadays. So culture meat just for those who don't know is just animal cell that are that are cultured in in vitro so in the lab by the bureau actors, and, and you can produce meat in that way. So it seems that we know the most of the technique, but still there is a way to go to commercialize it fully at large scale. And so we've so there are statements that this meat can really have drastic impact in particular regarding the environment of course it will have drastic impact. Regarding animal welfare because we basically don't need animals except for for getting the animal cells, but also for the environment may reduce very significantly the animal impacts, the environmental impacts. And, but the key question here is, will consumers demand it by it. And so we in the room and that's that's a preliminary work it's not published yet we wanted to know more about this. We, we did an experiment to get more to know more about the willingness to pay for the product and, and we ask them about the foie gras products so we are in southwest. So we know well what is foie gras, and it turned out that there is a French company out of the two start up producing producing culture meat there is one doing a culture foie gras it's called gourmet. And so we wanted to know whether this participant would buy culture foie gras gourmet. Of course, we cannot deliver that to the participants so we have we did a specific design still to have it incentive compatible as we say in economics so I cannot say more now I don't have time. Under the veil of ignorance and let's say it's incentive compatible we show that theoretically. And so what's what's the willingness to pay of a participant so we found you see you see consider a nice demand curve. About 80% of participants are willing to try and to buy culture meat. Nevertheless, for the moment we observe that the willingness to pay is pretty small about three euros per 100 grams of the product on average. For the sake of comparison the current price on average of the conventional foie gras is about seven euros per 100 gram and at this price we would only have 10% of the of the participant buying buying culture foie gras. So I think we're done for the presentation and we are happy to get your questions. Congratulations to both of you because you managed to respect exactly your timing so thank you for that. I'm going to give you a terrible pun now please excuse me and say thank you for the food for thought. Let's go on to our questions we have already quite a few questions come in thank you very much everybody. Thank you so much for the reminder on the, how that works for those of you who missed the explanation at the start. And you have a small button that was the bottom of your screen and in the menu bar in the zoom, which is called q amp a you click on there you can answer, ask your own questions. You can also vote for what you think are the most interesting questions to ask, and we will work through them I will try my best to choose the questions which seem to be the most popular. I'm sure they are all very interesting we'll try to get through as many as we can, and just a reminder also if you're on Facebook you can answer, ask your questions in the comments section, and we will bring those questions into the zoom chat here. So please feel free also to get involved. Okay. Nice to see you Roman as we have your image finally. Let's take this perhaps a couple of these first questions which are very popular. I think this is a good one to start with how we're talking about animal welfare but how do we measure animal welfare. I go for the next question. Okay. So okay so how we do we measure animal welfare so there are different ways to measure it. So we can, for instance, count the number of injuries or the rate of injuries, the rate of mortality, we can count the rate of stereotypes and so on. More intrusive method that consists in measuring for instance the blood the sample of stress cortisol and so on. And there are also some behavioral method used in etology we can for instance, explore the willingness to pay quote unquote of animals. Examining how they trade for instance more food with respect to more space or more social contacts. But still now we are very very far from being able to really measure preferences as we do in economics, and in particular to compare to compare them to human preferences and among animal themselves and I think in this presentation we have really emphasized the behavioral economics aspects of I think economics of animal welfare but there is another branch, which is, which is concerned which is social, social choice and VC and we expect a lot from scholars in this field we are not neither me or expert on that field to really help thinking about the measurement of animal welfare both theoretically and empirically. Okay. Thank you Nicola yes not not an easy one to answer there's a linked question actually coming up here which is, if we're thinking about the total welfare. Should we incorporate animal welfare into the utility function of humans or should it be completely independent. I'm going to start with this one so that's a good question. So there are different ways of integrating animals into the social welfare function. So today as most economics has been done animals were not considered at all so it was mostly a human standard totally human nature utility social welfare function. So that could be to include animals indirectly saying yes humans care about animals and since we care about humans we should also care about animals. But we could also say that one step further and say that animals have utilities on their own so we should incorporate them. But here we could also say we still have a preference for humans animals are part of society but we still have a preference for humans. So what we could say we should have equal interest for animals consideration for animals and humans. And finally, some authors also say that we could have give a stronger way to the utility of animals, because animals do not take back to decision making the only somehow the victims of our decisions. So we should give more weight to them to protect them even more. So that in total five possibilities. I think economists are discussing that a lot. What has been done so far mostly is that I mean there are a few papers that say, let's have a look when we incorporate them indirectly. But the author says, at the end of the paper, we should consider the utility directly so I think there is a change in mentality today and we have one work with Nicola trash on this where we try to directly incorporate them. That's the major challenge. Okay, thank you very interesting. Perhaps, oops, could have a subject change because this question is coming up as being very popular. Coming back to your notion of cultured meat, which we've discovered with your fake foie gras. One of our audience members is asking, would it be useful to force customers to buy this biological green cultured meat or instead of factory found animals. The current price difference does not apparently get sufficient uptake of biological meat and just only offering that would bring the higher price down due to economies of scale. What do you think about that would you agree. The consumer to buy is quite a quite a strong statement, I guess. Could we nudge them to buy Nicola you work on nudges. Yeah, I've, I've, yeah, it's a big challenge to, to, to, to explore how we can influence consumers so that they can reduce their externalities associated with their full choices so one. The next tool we can use is the fiscal tool. At this point, there is no carbon tax on food products, for instance, the recent studies have shown that if we introduce a carbon tax on food products, it will quite double the price of ruminant meat for instance. So any quite significantly increase also that the price of chicken and pork meat but almost no effect on plant based food. That would be a starting point we can of course go beyond that and include also over environmental externalities into the price so that's one direction but we know that there is a lot of resistance to change in price. So then, not just to be used the laundry there but you mentioned at the beginning thank you Jenny is a sort of magic. Roman do you think of some efficient nudge we can use. I think it I'm not sure. I mean, I think the question was what you mean I would just mentioned that forcing people may actually induce reactants. People don't like to feel restricted in their choice. So I think so this is all the current debate about positive or negative framing relating to environmental policies and have the same here. So I think that's one of the things on this that, for instance, we consider the example of gourmet which is about the program. So, this is a real program it's just it's not produced in the same way as as usually. But so, and they start with program also because the price for five I said he's relatively high. What we know for for the French company is that they didn't want to communicate on their price when they come to the market in two years from now, but what they told us is that they're going to be a market market. So they start with luxury goods, where you have the largest margin, and I'm quite sure that with that they will, they will be competitive then they will increase their economies of scale as you mentioned, and they will become even more competitive so I'm quite confident that market will will will work quite well here. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, and it might seem might be more a question of encouragement and forcing in that sense. Okay, we have a very popular question here which is again coming to a different aspect about the NGO campaigns I don't know if you've read that one but Vincent Clarase is asking what would you say is the reason behind the backfire effect in the case of abolitionist NGO campaigns. Any ideas. So in the paper we interpret that as a reactance what I just mentioned, reactance occurs whenever people tell you what to do and you feel somehow restricted in your freedom of choice. So the well known example is whenever you have a friend who's mocking and you tell him or her, you should definitely stop smoking. If he hears that every day, then at the end she keeps mocking just because she doesn't want to be told what to do. So somehow we suspect that we obtain something similar here. People don't want to be told that what they do is very bad and they should stop a completely eating meat. So this is a popular explanation, but maybe there are also other explanations. So perhaps tell them what we what we do with our kids we tell them eat lots of meat and they may stop. I don't know whether it would work. So depending on the theory or you have in mind but so you have two types of reactance either reactance is emotional or it is a rational so emotional reactance is really you stop thinking and you just do what people tell you not to do to really restore your freedom of choice or you have cognitive reactance. It is when you try to find arguments to justify what what what you did was was right. So you have those two types of reactance effects. So the difficulty in the debate is when people actually just quite enjoy it and perhaps think they should they should make an effort they realize perhaps an effort should be made but when you just quite enjoy something it's very difficult perhaps to stop you know addiction effect as well. So this is a small example because you mentioned Linda there, for instance, reaction to Linda there. There was some people doing red Saturday, like eating meal on Saturday to just to to protest against Linda there so it was a typical case of yeah. And perhaps Nicola and some people listening and watching us today will know what Linda there the green Monday was but could you perhaps explain a little bit more quickly for those who don't and give us just a quick insight into what your findings for after the experience. Yes, so Laurent beg a psychologist really thought about this initiative and propose me to call to come on board. So Monday there is a meatless day there exist many initiatives and meet less days in the world. So but they didn't, they didn't exist any initiative in France as far as we know. So we decided to implement this initiative so the principle is that we suggest to people that they don't eat animal animal flesh on specific day so every Monday, every week. And, and so we, we, we wrote a sort of short article with reasons for doing so and we publish that we're in the in Le Monde, which is one of the main newspaper in France. We've signed by people in academia but also actors and actresses famous famous one. Thank you to them because it helps us to get a lot of visibility, a lot of buzz and many negative reaction as well as Roman mentioned. And from that, we, there was a lot of discussions about these and, and, and we observed that significant part of the population seem to be aware of that initiative and for all the rest of the university restaurant now in France implement on the bear. And we did a few studies on that. And for instance, we found that some specific segment of the population are more willing to do Monday there like female, more educated, more liberal people for instance and we also had a psychological test, but one of the big five and it's not a surprise more people who are more open to experience are more willing to participate. Okay, thanks. Congratulations on the initiative. Let's get back to our questions from the room. We have a question here on ethical and environmental concerns is cultured meet a potential answer for ethical and environmental concerns and how does this affect the WTP. I don't know what WTP is. Yes, willingness to pay. So, very good question. So both the moral impact so basically it will, it will eliminate suffering because animal cells don't suffer, they don't have interest. So, so that's, that's clear but that's morally should be an improvement. It's a bit more difficult to think about death because on, we don't need really animals to do that so but on the other end animal don't exist anymore except for so then it raised the question of what we deal with what we are going to do with these animals. And so that's a bit so I discussed that in one of my paper. It's a bit more challenging. About the environmental impacts it's very difficult to tell because at this point there are only a handful of studies and very exploratory very there is a lot of uncertainty but even now we given that the technique is really imperfect. Still we can project a lot of potential positive impact of culture meet most specifically on land use it may massively reduce land use which opens many possibilities for natural regeneration for instance for forestation and so on. But also, it's about 75% reduction projections in terms of greenhouse emissions, a lot of reduction in terms of pollution of water, and so on so the big issue to understand here is that with culture meet there is no more production of methane and hydroxide, but we need electricity energy to run the, the, the, the reactor. So we replace methane by CO2. And so, so it's a bit of a trade off but still current projections suggest that we will reduce massively the, the, the emissions of the greenhouse gases. Okay. Thanks. We have a question on the policy side of things a carbon tax on meat seems to be a good tool, according to a certain number of scientists but do you think the EU will be ready prepared to implement such a tool anytime soon. I think taxation is a, is a very difficult issue in terms of public acceptance. So, for instance, so today we live in the, I would say in the world, the post yellow jacket world where I mean we see that people are kind of bored with taxation, and especially if you know, in France we had the bonnet rouge, so red hats in, in Montana, where, so it was a protestation against carbon tax. So, I'm not sure today, the next step is having carbon tax. I think the next step at the European level is to change the subsidies from the political commune, I don't know in English sorry, so the general policy for agriculture in Europe, where today they still keep funding some industries, some farm industries and large intensive farms. So I think the first step for a good big Indian world would be to stop those subsidies to industries that generate negative externalities. I'm not sure if you have something to add. We'll see, I mean there has been already several reports produced by the different European countries recommending to tax food products and end up taxing mostly meat products. So today we go in the other direction because we subsidize a lot of these products and we tend to subsidize more animal, animal production. So, at least I feel as a woman suggested we need to revert the tendency. I think tax on food product could be, it could be a good idea and I think it will come in some countries at first. Probably because we also need to send a signal to consumers. And at this point, greening the cap, the common agricultural policy has been really not has not been working so we need to try something else. Okay. Yeah, we had a question on this actually we had a question on whether the carbon tax on meat had been experimented in certain countries and what was the effect. So you're thinking we haven't gone that way and we need a few countries possibly to do that. Okay. In any case, not in Europe, perhaps outside of Europe. No, not that I know. I don't think so. I'm not aware. I just like to mention because we can maybe anticipate some of the effects that would happen here. I just know some experimental works that look at how people change their decision to eat when they have this carbon budget in mind. So what we see is that of course people decrease red meat consumption, which is good for the environment and also for health, but we also see an increase in chicken consumption. So, there is a substitution from red meat to white meat. So for the third externality I know we're afraid it's quite bad news, because our chicken are very bad viewing conditions. So we are with if you have a tax on carbon tax only, we only saw part of the problem, and we focus on one type of X-90 instead of adding a framework considering three types of externalities. Okay. Yeah, we have a question here which is kind of linked on the socially optimal price for meat so perhaps to take into account the living conditions for chicken that the price should perhaps be socially optimally increased so that people understand the difference between living conditions perhaps for chicken and I wouldn't dare to say what are the kinds of animals have better living conditions but Yes, that's a very good follow up question what is the socially optimal price of meat. We need to account for climate as Romans say we need to account for over environmental X-90 we may also want to account for health externality or internalities we may account for zone or tick risk because of now we know that it's a big issue until it's used as well. And then that has not been researched in economics to account for animal welfare. And then you can start thinking about the socially optimal tax on meat. You can understand that it's really a big research question. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It was a question here which I think was probably related to one of your graphs which came in earlier which was to ask if, if that says that higher you were saying that higher income countries are higher meat consumers I think this is perhaps related to something that you showed just to make sure the public had understood. Let me just show you another graph. I'm sorry if my video then stops. So this is a graph from the welding data using data from FL again. So this is where the relationship you can see between meat consumption per capita here. So here you have the log of the countries income per capita GDP per capita sorry. And so you can see here there is a strong correlation between the two, the larger I mean the more developed and the larger economic development, then the higher the consumption of meat. You have countries like the US. Okay here but as I told you China here it's China here is also growing. Here for the lowest and maybe it's a flat it's a new relationship but then there is a clear increase correlation positive correlation between the economic development and meat consumption. If I can just compliment that there is also there is evidence that the positive relationship but it might be some sort of inflection point and after some level of income it seems both at the country level and also at the individual level. We have a study with the city in the morning and very old school but that it seems that it starts to decrease. So, then it's also a research question why after some level of wealth, it seems that meat consumption decreases visit for health for instance or moral reasons or other reasons, and when the next question will be up to which point it will it will decrease and will be transferred in a sense to develop to developing countries. Okay so you've got most of these on the cards in that case. Okay. We still have quite a lot of questions opens don't hesitate everybody we may have time to take one or two more we have seven left on Alice we'll keep going we have eight minutes and seven questions. Looking to EU policy again. Yes, and we mirror is asking what policy should do to improve the level of animal welfare in the EU farming sector, considering a global marketplace. So it's a very good question because one of the big problem is the fact that we live in a very competitive international world and even if some country wants to put some higher animal welfare standards. The problem is that some other country with lower standards will be more competitive and then the part of the population we purchase these products and the problem is that we cannot currently prevent or ban the import of some food product that does not satisfy some some animal welfare or so it's at the WTO that we should fix that unfortunately there is no sign that it will change. But that's indeed indeed a key question for the future of this issue of being able to really tax some import or ban some import because of the standard are lower so it's a problem of leakage we have a similar problem in climate change for instance that we have in animal welfare for the regarding animal welfare issues. I want to complement to add to what Nicola just said. So I think that to, I mean relating to a question to issues with animal welfare first animal welfare is a public good. So, same as for climate change, everyone contributes. So, your contribution is at the individual level so you have the private cost of contributing but you have the benefits are shared among everyone. So this tendency to towards a zero contribution freerider problem that you that you could have in Europe. It's a problem in Europe because you can ban for instance in the country, some production methods that you cannot ban the sale of the products in your country. So this so this is a nightmare in terms of freeriding problem. And the second point is that, as Nicola mentioned some other animal welfare is so it's a credit credence good. Whenever you buy transform products from another countries or eggs or whatever, I'll meet you don't know how it was raised when you consume the product. So you do not have direct information and this is typically a problem but this is also a problem for other ethical issues like when you buy some clothes, you don't know currently if it has been prepared by we goers in China exploited and so on. So this is the same time of time to apply here. Okay, yeah, thank you. Interesting. I think Nicola coming back to Linda there's a question on here which I think you're going to be able to answer because I think you did try some, I think Linda there was taken also into some public to some extent to the public sector. There's a question here on whether that could be imposed on public buildings, schools, universities, what may be the barriers and I know, perhaps without imposing it you did actually have some London initiatives taken up for example in school canteens lunchtime. The university canteens decided to implement Linda there. And then there is a more general question of having some green days in public institutions like you mentioned hospitals or institutions. It's a very difficult issue currently in France. So you may be aware of that we have a discussion about whether we should provide vegetarian option in school canteens and you may know that it has been very, very hot issues, many politicians including including some high level ministers in France take two positions on that. The Ministry and the environmental minister of the Minister of the environment were in favor but on the other hand the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Agriculture took a position against it so it's really controversial topic. So we are not at the stage of imposing that just an option is an issue. So it's a very difficult and you can tell that what's going on around me. So there is a very polarized issue. Do you want to add something on that? Oh it just two weeks ago they were the last so there were some debates for the current law in France about the law against climate change and some elected deputies they passed a bill to forbid canteens to have a vegetarian meal when there is only one meal. So they asked for diversity in foods and in the description of their project they says that vegetarian meals are nightmare and so on so it was very badly implemented. But last week there was a leak in the reports of the Ministry of Agriculture about how vegetarian meals are implemented in France in public schools and the report is quite positive. So it just requires sometimes to form people working in the canteens but when they are well formed and when they cook well then it becomes tasty then the students and by eating it and it's better also for environment and so on. Okay yeah so a lot to do a lot of educational effort to make on all the different levels for that. Okay we have a few minutes for a few more questions we have a question actually a question that's been here since the start perhaps we should just attack it although I think the reply is probably very personal and subjective is it natural to care for animal welfare. So that's that's a very interesting question. So first we, we may say that what is natural is not necessarily what is morally good. Okay, many things are natural can be explained by evolutionary reasons but they are not morally good. Okay, so it's a very important question very relevant question, but not maybe in terms of ethics. So, is it natural to care about animals so there is a lot of studies that concern whether we care about others humans versus humans or whether any animals care about each other even across species but interestingly there is almost no study about humans caring for animals, as far as I know. So we need to learn about this and there could be reasons for why we care about animals. For instance, we may we care about babies and to be a sort of extension to that and it seems that indeed that there is evidence that we care more about animals that look like babies, for instance. There is also an history of relationship with animals, we have developed partnership with dogs with horses. We learn to cooperate with them and the better we care about them the better we may cooperate with them and probably the same with some farm animals. So we need to learn about this but indeed it's one of the key question a bit outside of economics I would say but my colleague at EST here, biologists and so on I think they be very nice but we learn more about these issues. Thank you. Thank you everybody for your questions. We managed to get through a good amount of them. I'm not going to make any promises about written replies but I think we should be able to keep the questions that haven't been answered at least to feed into Nicola romance research questions and thoughts so that will be useful whatever happens thank you for those. Thank you, Nicola for being with us. Thank you for sharing your expertise on the on the subject and for answering so many questions. Thank you for being with us to our audience and for taking part. There will be a video recording on the web of the webinar available very shortly on TSE's YouTube channel. If you're interested in our research please of course visit our website at TSE and the link will appear on the chat right now and you can follow us on all our social networks Facebook LinkedIn Instagram Twitter. Stay updated on upcoming events will be making more webinars like this soon. Nicola Romo if you have any final comments then please over to you. Thanks a lot for the organization. A hidden organizational team behind us here. Thank you very much to them too, and have a good evening or good day everybody of you on the other side of the world. Thank you very much.