China must tame its donkey trade for Africa’s sake

Last year was rough for many Chinese companies due to the country’s harsh zero-COVID policies, but not for traditional medicine maker Dong-E-E-Jiao.

Its annual net profit soared 77.1% in 2022 to 780 million yuan ($113.44 million). But the company’s hopes of maintaining this pace face a unique constraint: the inelastic supply of, and socioeconomic complexity around, donkey hides, the source of the gelatin that is the main ingredient for Dong-E-E-Jiao’s flagship product, ejiao.

Ejiao is an ancient potion which is increasingly consumed both as medicine and as an expensive health supplement. It is believed to have properties that strengthen the blood and improve the quality of both vital fluids and sleep, helping hold back aging in the process.

Once the preserve of the imperial court and elites in Shandong province, ejiao today enjoys a much wider consumer market thanks to Dong-E-E-Jiao and other industrial-scale producers.

Tellingly, the same week that Dong-E-E-Jiao announced its annual results, Kenyan police made two arrests for illegal donkey slaughter. While many countries are seeking new export opportunities, this is not so much for the notoriously slow-breeding donkey, on which many rural poor rely.

Many voices on the continent are calling for new limits or bans on donkey exports. At a time when China is positioning itself as a crucial supporter of African social and economic development, Beijing should tackle the negative impact its donkey imports are having on the continent’s poor and the resentment they are generating.

In 1990, when ejiao was first trademarked, China was home to the world’s largest donkey population and the ejiao industry consumed around 400,000 hides a year.

Since then, China’s population has become significantly older and wealthier. Many more people have gotten health insurance that includes ejiao coverage. The hit 2011 television series “Empresses in the Palace,” which portrayed imperial court infighting between ejiao-consuming concubines, further mainstreamed the potion for middle-class consumers.

According to the Shandong Ejiao Industry Association, annual sales of ejiao products reached 53.5 billion yuan in 2020, up from 19.6 billion yuan in 2013. Ejiao now sells for around $780 per kilogram.

As a result of the cultivated demand for ejiao, Chinese producers today consume around 5 million donkey hides a year even though the world is home to only around 50 million donkeys, according to a research report published by the South African Institute for International Affairs. The typical jenny, as female donkeys are known, gives birth to just two foals in its lifetime and not usually on a breeder’s preferred timetable.

Consequently, China’s ejiao factories, concentrated in Shandong, have been experiencing donkey hide supply constraints since around 2010.

The industry’s first response was to invest in domestic donkey breeding on small farms in western regions of China and large-scale ones in Shandong. But even highly sophisticated in vitro fertilization programs on large-scale farms had limited success increasing births.

Because of this, China has relied increasingly on imports, particularly from Africa, home to about two-thirds of the world’s 53 million donkeys. Reliable data on donkey numbers and Chinese hide imports from Africa is lacking. Moreover, British animal welfare group Donkey Sanctuary estimates that around a third of hides sent to China come from stolen donkeys.

Some donkey experts fear that at the current rate of hide consumption, Africa could be cleared of donkeys within a decade or two, bringing an end to a 7,000-year pastoralist tradition. One study of South Africa’s donkey population estimated that it fell to about 146,000 in 2019 from 210,000 in 1996, in large part due to the hide trade.

The rising price put on donkeys for their skins has made the live animal unaffordable for many poor Africans who have traditionally depended on the animals as a source of socioeconomic mobility.

Households whose donkeys have been stolen suffer not just a loss of income, but diminished health and security too. Typically, female household members are forced to take over the donkey’s duties, leading to back pain and diminished off-farm income. Girls are often compelled to drop out of school to help with tasks such water collection and taking goods to market. In addition, for many rural households, a donkey serves as a de facto nighttime security guard.

To protect the physical and socioeconomic mobility of rural and poor communities, and especially of women, a growing number of African states, including Ivory Coast and Tanzania, have banned trade in donkey hides or imposed strict export quotas. But since donkeys are usually kept in remote rural areas, African authorities have had a hard time stopping theft and smuggling.

Last December, the African Union organized the first Pan African Donkey Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in conjunction with regional economic bodies and animal welfare groups, drawing speakers including Tanzanian Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa.

The conference issued a call for an Africa-wide ban on donkey exports that would last a decade or more until the continent’s regulatory capacity and animal population have reached the point where the supply of donkeys for the continent’s rural poor is guaranteed.

China itself strictly regulates African agricultural imports to protect domestic food security and public welfare. To support Africa’s needs, Beijing would be advised to defuse donkey tensions by bringing the hide trade under an equally tight import regime and prosecuting those engaged in illegal trading.

In parallel, China’s ejiao industry should craft a sustainable ejiao brand to assure consumers that their habits are congruent with both the survival of the donkey and the needs of the world’s rural poor. China’s efforts with celebrity-filled publicity campaigns and trade regulation have successfully reduced demand for ivory and other illegally traded wildlife-derived products, providing ample lessons for the ejiao industry to learn from.

In June, the Chinese city of Changsha will host the 3rd China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, with Shandong as a featured provincial participant. Shandong’s ejiao industry should grasp the occasion to launch a new approach to ejiao with more consideration for African need for donkeys and thus put the foundations of China-Africa relations on a stronger footing.

The author is an associate professor with the University of Sydney’s China Studies Center