Demand for ejiao is leading to the mass slaughter of African donkeys, says advocate

Advocates warn that demand for a traditional Chinese medicinal product called ejiao is leading to the death of donkeys in Africa – and to the communities that rely on them.

Ejiao is made from collagen harvested from donkey skin. It is sold as a powder or gelatin blocks that can then be made into a tea, and is thought to have health benefits targeted at women, including for menstruation and as a blood tonic.

However, the ejiao industry requires millions of donkeys each year, and currently harvests most of it from Africa, where many communities rely on the donkeys as beasts of burden. A study by British charity The Donkey Sanctuary found that Botswana’s donkey population dropped by more than a third between 2011 and 2017.

The use of collagen in the global beauty industry is also under scrutiny, with a recent investigation linking the billion-dollar celebrity-endorsed industry to deforestation and the invasion of Indigenous lands in the Amazon.

Now guest host Mark Kelley spoke with Sian Edwards, campaign manager at The Donkey Sanctuary in the UK, about her organization’s work in finding more sustainable alternatives. This is part of the conversation.

With this harvest, what do you see as the impact on the donkey population?

Demand in the multi-billion pound ejiao industry is huge, donkeys are not enough. Certainly not in China, where the majority of ejiao is sold.

The industry needs about 5 million donkeys, so ejiao producers go around the world and usually get donkeys from where the donkey population is higher.

Donkeys are not very easy to cultivate, they cannot produce like cattle or sheep, but they are used for human livelihood. So they go to countries where there are a lot of donkeys in the community – precisely because donkeys are needed – and the donkeys are sometimes willing to be sold, but very often they are stolen or sold, and then they are slaughtered in the country. Then the skin is exported to China to be made into ejiao.

So it is a great crisis for people, not caring about the welfare of donkeys. It really caused people who depended on donkeys for their livelihood a big problem. And the boys were pulled out of school to do the donkey work, and of course it was the women to take the work that the donkeys were going to use.

I heard that the focus is already on the African continent. So tell me more about the impact of the loss of the donkey, that [it] already in communities in Africa.

You can imagine all the jobs that donkeys do for communities – where they have to have donkeys to collect water, to take things to market. If the donkey disappears from the community, there is no way for the family to save themselves. And they’re losing income and potentially, like I said, having to take kids out of education if they’re being educated, because labor is needed. I must also say that it is not just Africa, it is a global problem.

How many donkeys … are killed to support this industry?

From the extrapolation of the ejiao industry’s own figure, we calculate that about 5 million donkeys are needed every year, and there is a lot of demand. So we can see that number increasing.

Is it a sustainable way?

It is not sustainable. That is exactly the problem that the industry has.

Once the population of donkeys is depleted somewhere, they have to move somewhere else. There just aren’t enough donkeys. And as I mentioned before, they don’t grow well. China has tried to put a donkey breeding program, and they can produce some, but not enough for the demand that the industry needs.

The good news is that there are humane alternatives available. The cellular agriculture industry, for example, has been used in collagen and animal protein foods and in some cases, medicine. So we see it as a potential growth area to provide enough collagen in a humane, clean and sustainable way for the ejiao industry.

Does the company hear your wake-up call here?

We are doing our best at Donkey Sanctuary to talk meaningfully with the ejiao producers, so that we can discuss the alternatives and hopefully see the trade and industry become sustainable, which they say they want. But so far, we haven’t seen the results to show that this is the case.