  For a large set of flavor symmetries, the lowest-dimensional baryon- or
lepton-number violating operators in the Standard Model effective field theory
(SMEFT) with flavor symmetry are of mass dimension 9. As a consequence, baryon-
and lepton-number violating processes are further suppressed with the
introduction of flavor symmetries, e.g., the allowed scale associated with
proton decay is typically lowered to $10^5$ GeV, which is significantly lower
than the GUT scale. To illustrate these features, we discuss Minimal Flavor
Violation for the Standard Model augmented by sterile neutrinos.
