Donkey skin is used to make e’jiao, a 2,500-year-old traditional remedy that became popular after appearing in a Chinese TV series.
In Africa, donkeys are prized for helping people transport water and goods, and some owners even consider them “soul friends”.
About a decade ago, however, growing demand from China for donkey skins began to sever this vital lifeline. Donkey skin is used to make e’jiao , a 2,500-year-old traditional remedy that became popular after appearing in a Chinese TV series.
Produced from gelatin extracted from donkey skin, e’jiao is today marketed to women as a blood tonic to enhance fertility, overcome dizziness, insomnia and other diseases, although there is little reliable scientific evidence to support its effectiveness.
E’jiao has also become a popular ingredient in beauty products , including face creams and moisturizers.
E’jiao is made from gelatin extracted from donkey skin. (Photo: BBC).
Liu Guangyuan, vice president of Dong’e E’jiao, China’s largest e’jiao producer, said: ” E’jiao is one of the three great treasures of traditional Chinese medicine, along with deer horns. and ginseng “.
The history of E’jiao dates back to around the second century BC. Legend has it that in the 19th century, Empress Dowager Cixi of the Qing Dynasty used e’jiao to conceive and give birth to a child and then became emperor. Since then, many people have spread word of mouth about its miraculous uses.
After going viral in modern Chinese society, this brown, foul-smelling gelatin is marketed in China as a “panacea” at sky-high prices. A gram of e’jiao in 2007 cost , more expensive than gold.
Meanwhile, as noted by Foreign Policy in 2017, 250g of e’jiao, which looks like a chocolate bar, sells for up to 0 per piece (in special cases, the price can be as much as 10 times more). time).
The Chinese consider e’jiao to be a panacea. (Photo: Native Chinese).
The biology of donkeys makes it impossible to breed them as cattle. Meanwhile, China’s burgeoning e’jiao industry consumes between 2.3 and 4.8 million donkey skins a year, most of which comes from Africa as domestic supply is gradually dwindling.
In just two decades, China’s donkey herd – once the largest in the world – has shrunk from 11 million to less than 6 million, while GDP per capita has increased nearly tenfold (from over ,800). in 1995 to more than 14,000 USD in 2015).
Migration has greatly reduced demand for donkeys in rural China, but growing wealth in cities has boosted demand for consumer products such as e’jiao. As a result, the amount of donkey skin imported from developing countries has increased dramatically.
As slaughterhouses opened up across Africa to meet growing demand from China, donkey theft also began to skyrocket, undermining the communities and families that depended on them.
Across the African continent, the price of donkey skins has skyrocketed. If before, donkeys cost only 8 USD/head, but due to demand from China, the price of donkeys has increased to 150 USD/head, creating an illegal economic niche earning tens of millions of USD per year.
The growing demand for donkeys in China has led to a rampant donkey skin trade in Africa. (Photo: National Geographic).
From Nigeria to South Africa, the smuggling of donkey skins to Chinese traders became common. There are criminal groups scouring the countryside looking for people willing to sell donkey skins, while evading export bans and other regulations on when and how animals are slaughtered.
“Chinese importers started asking for donkeys in 2014,” said a former South African trade consultant, who asked not to be named. “There are seven companies, each looking to buy about 10,000 donkey skins a year. It’s a huge opportunity for rural economic development but there’s no framework to support legal trade. And when you can’t go the legal route, you go through the mafia.”
Outside of Africa, several countries in Asia have seen an opportunity in the growing demand for donkey skins in China. Government officials from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan have proposed exporting to China 80,000 live donkeys per year under the framework of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Pakistan is one of nine countries that ban the export of donkey skins for religious purposes. People worry that if only donkey skin is exported, the rest of the donkey meat will be sold in the market in the name of beef. Therefore, in order to circumvent the law and seize opportunities from China, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has devised a way to export live donkeys.
Not only is the problem of donkey skin smuggling becoming a concern, China’s “panacea” fever also entails the risk of spreading deadly diseases from Africa to Asia .
As reported by Donkey Sanctuary, a UK-based non-profit organization, the results of a genetic skin test taken from a Keynia abattoir found samples positive for African equine disease and MRSA – a group of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Scientists fear that China’s “panacea” fever entails the risk of spreading deadly diseases from Africa to Asia. (Photo: National Geographic).
This is the first definitive evidence that donkey skins can act as a vector for the transmission of disease around the world, said Simon Pope, the organization’s head of investigations. The skin trade is no longer a hypothetical risk to humans and animals.
According to Faith Burden, an infectious disease specialist at Donkey Sanctuary, in Africa, donkeys often travel hundreds of miles to the slaughterhouse, across national borders. When they arrive, the veterinary and biosecurity controls there are often not up to the standard to detect sick donkeys.
“People buy e’jiao as a health-promoting product, but I don’t think they’d buy it again if they knew how it’s actually made,” Pope said, noting that there’s a clear difference. There is a stark contrast between the promotional images in China (in which donkeys frolic around the green plateau with crystal clear streams) and the harsh reality of African slaughterhouses.