How China’s demand for donkey hide is devastating African communities

China’s demand for a traditional medicine known as e-jiao is fueling the slaughter of millions of donkeys every year, say animal welfare groups and veterinary experts.

E-jiao, which is made using collagen extracted from donkey hides, is the vital ingredient in food and beauty products believed by many Chinese consumers to enrich the blood, improve the immune system, and prevent diseases.

Reuters spoke to more than a dozen experts, including veterinarians and academics, to examine how demand for e-jiao is rippling across communities in Africa, which rely heavily on the donkey, and how the trade in hide continues to boom despite efforts by some African nations to restrict it.

Traditionally, e-jiao was a luxury product. It gained favor among elites during the Qing dynasty that ruled China from 1644 until 1912. Its popularity has surged in recent years due partly to its use in the Chinese television series ‘Empress in the Palace’, which started airing in 2011. The rise in demand has also been fuelled by China’s growing middle class and rising elderly population.

Its price has leapt 30-fold in the past decade from 100 yuan per 500 grams to 2,986 yuan ($420), according to Chinese state media.

The e-jiao industry requires an estimated 5.9 million donkey skins annually, which has put unprecedented pressure on global populations, according to a report released in February by The Donkey Sanctuary, a British charity devoted to the animal’s welfare.

China’s donkey population has fallen more than 80% to just under 2 million from 11 million in 1992, prompting its e-jiao industry to source donkey skins from overseas.

The consumption boom for e-jiao has led to international commodification of donkeys, says Lauren Johnston, an expert on China-Africa relations who published a study in January last year called “China, Africa and the Market for Donkeys”.

As Africa has the world’s largest donkey population, it has emerged as the key source of donkey skins.

The donkey is used extensively as a workhorse across the continent, particularly for transport, helping to alleviate poverty. It frees many women and girls from some hard physical labour and domestic chores. Its essential role in many African villages clashes with the sky-rocketing demand for donkey hides in China, Johnston said.

“Aside from donkey welfare and supply risks, the consequences for the rural poor in Africa - women and girls in particular - are heart-breaking and counter to mutual development goals,” she said.

Slaughtering and smuggling

In Nigeria alone, tens of thousands of donkeys are slaughtered annually due to the demand for hides, according to Ibrahim Ado Shehu, a veterinary epidemiologist in the capital, Abuja.

While Nigeria’s government banned exports of donkeys in 2019, slaughtering was still permitted. Typically, donkeys are brought from neighbouring Niger - across the northern border - on a market day, sold off and driven in trucks to southern Nigeria, where they are slaughtered and the skin is exported to China, he said.

The African Union - the 55-member regional bloc - said in February it had banned the slaughter of donkeys for their skin across the continent. The next step is the creation of policies by the Regional Economic Communities (REC) and member states to guide the implementation of the African Union resolution, said Mwenda Mbaka, a veterinarian and animal welfare expert based in Kenya.

“Any government that condones the continued slaughter of the donkeys is in contravention of the ban,” he said. “Such countries can be censored through the structures established for the purpose by the REC and Continental frameworks.”

The move was widely praised by animal welfare groups and environmentalists as a milestone toward protecting Africa’s donkeys. However, many said that implementation will be challenging and there is a large risk that illegal trade will continue to take place.

Even before the African Union ban, some countries had already passed legislation to curb the trade. Botswana, Burkina Faso and Uganda banned the export of donkey skin whilst Tanzania in 2022 implemented a 10-year ban on donkey slaughter.

Despite individual country bans and moves to regulate the donkey skin trade, donkey trafficking and illegal slaughtering remains rife.

“Enforcement of the continent-wide ban will be the biggest challenge,” said Shehu.

Another concern is that donkeys can spread zoonotic diseases - maladies that can pass from animals to humans - such as brucellosis (a flu-like bacterial infection) and leptospirosis (also known as Weil’s disease) during the slaughter process or along shipment routes, industry experts said.

After the animals have been skinned, their hides are left to dry under the sun. Drying and salting, which is done to process the donkey skins before shipping to China, allows some pathogens to survive, veterinarians and conservation groups said.

The process to make e-jiao comprises many steps including boiling the donkey skin to get gelatin, then filtering, cutting, drying and cleaning. The final product can be made into products ranging from face creams and liquors to cake and candy.

China’s appetite for the hides has seen many skins mass-processed in modern factories using large tanks for boiling the hide. But the underlying process remains similar to traditional practices used for centuries in China.

Traditional E-jiao preparation

Once famed as a delicacy for the very wealthy, e-jiao is widely seen as a contemporary Chinese superfood and associated with gift giving, comparable to ginseng or expensive tea.

Many e-jiao products are readily available on common online platforms such as Amazon and Taobao, which sell items including Shandong walnut e-jiao cake and e-jiao black sesame balls.

Social and economic problems magnified

The donkey remains one of the most affordable means of transporting goods and people in many rural African communities. Even in harsh conditions, the animals can travel long distances with heavy loads.

“When China’s e-jiao demand disrupts this role, decades before Africa’s poor are able to replace donkeys with mechanized vehicles, this not only fails to foster prosperity but may also see a return to poverty, especially among women,” said Johnston.

China has been Africa’s largest trading partner since 2009. The China-Africa donkey trade has become a controversial issue that may harm China’s bigger aspirations in the Global South, she said.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson told Reuters that China and Africa’s economic and trade cooperation had “developed vigorously” in recent years, bringing “tangible benefits” to people on both sides.

“China has always respected Africa’s wishes in its cooperation and is committed to achieving mutual benefit and win-win results,” the spokesperson said, adding that the government has always required Chinese companies and citizens to abide by local laws and regulations.

The African Union did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Breeding attempts

In recent years, China has begun looking to countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan to source donkey skin. Most donkey skins shipped from Pakistan to China are part of an undercover trade, said Muhammad A. Kavesh, director of the South Asia Research Institute at the Australian National University.

For instance, in 2022 in Karachi, a shipment was seized carrying almost 10 metric tons of donkey skins to Hong Kong. The shipment was initially declared as carrying salt and handkerchiefs, Kavesh said.

Unlike pigs and cows, however, donkeys are very slow to reproduce, say animal experts. Females, known as Jennies, are pregnant for around 11-14.5 months and then typically give birth to just a single foal.

Establishing a farming system capable of supplying the full 5.9 million skins required annually to make e-jiao could take more than two decades, said The Donkey Sanctuary.

Booming e-jiao industry in China

E-jiao has a 3,000 year history in the northern Shandong province, according to the government-backed China Daily newspaper. The province accounts for around 90% of China’s e-jiao production, it said.

E-jiao is a “national cultural heritage” and is one of the most important products in the traditional Chinese medicine industry, according to Chinese state media.

Four companies dominate the e-jiao sector, according to Johnston’s China-Africa report, with Dong-E-E-Jiao accounting for around 60% of total production, the Fu brand controlling 15% of the market and Taiji and Tongrentang Ejiao controlling 10% each.

Dong E-E-Jiao, partly owned by China’s state-backed China Resources Group, said in March that its net profit surged 48% last year to 1.15 billion yuan ($159 million) due to strong sales of donkey hide gelatin products in China.

The company, which employs more than 3,700 people, cited long-term risks such as the fall in the number of donkeys, noting that research on breeding and disease-control lag behind demand for skins. It did not respond to requests for comment.

Dong E-E-Jiao together with the Dong’ e county government opened a large-scale e-jiao tourism site called ‘E-jiao World’ in China’s Shandong province in 2018. Spanning more than 200 acres, it includes a museum, health tourism facilities, shopping and entertainment to educate visitors on how e-jiao is made.

Dong says the site also includes areas researching donkey breeding and cryopreservation technology.

It may be more challenging for companies to source donkey hides after the African Union ban, say industry experts and animal rights campaigners.

Megan Sheraton, global communications manager at Brooke, a charity that seeks to protect horses, donkeys and mules, said that while the AU ban was a great step forward “it will take quite some time for it to be introduced throughout the continent”.

To date, the patchwork of different legislation across Africa has made it hard to protect donkeys: it has been easy for traders to move donkeys across borders and change trade routes.

Janneke Merkx, Campaigns Manager at the Donkey Sanctuary, said that over time the Africa Union’s decision would make it much harder for traders to operate across borders and to find ways to export hides.

“We hope it will encourage the e-jiao industry to stop importing donkey skins into China and start investing in sustainable alternatives such as lab-grown collagen.”