Chinese Demand is Fueling Donkey Theft and Stressing Farmers in Ghana

Kenyan Slaughterhouse

The Washington Post documents how the production of donkeys in Ghana affects the outcome and conflict between having the animal being used as transportation of goods to farmers in Ghana, and a product to merchants in China. In Ghana, farmers used donkeys as a dependable resource as an inexpensive way to transport goods from one village to another. Citizens view donkeys as bulky and cheap animals that rarely fall ill even when being malnourished. When a farmer loses one of their donkeys to either theft or death, it can be very devastating due to their value as a source of transportation. Besides being a great source of transporting goods, these animals can also carry wood and water and are critical sources of income for defenseless villages, especially for women. In China, donkeys were a key ingredient in producing medicines that were appointed abroad by other foreign countries by producers of energy drinks, fertility elixirs, and skin creams from Chinese merchants in the black market. Chinese herbalists perceive a donkey's death as a perfect opportunity to extract gelatine, which is an important ingredient to create ejiao which is found in different types of medicines from their hides. 

Because donkeys are viewed as a vital necessity between these two countries, this mammal production has drastically declined by 76% over the past several decades and existing mammals are being slaughtered at an alerting pace. The donkey population has also declined since 2007 in Brazil by 28%, in Botswana by 37%, and in Kyrgyzstan by 53% because of the amount of these animals being killed every day to meet the demand from the Chinese black market. Awal Ahmed Kariyama, a spokesman in Ghana, said that “If we don’t take care, the animal will go extinct”. Slaughterhouses within Ghana claim that they are legally supposed to dispose of any malnourished or old animals for meat to be sold later at the market. However, because the value of donkeys is high as the population becomes scarce, owners chose to keep the remaining corpse of the dead animal’s body and sell the hides to Chinese merchants in the black market for a higher cost. Furthermore, after the Chinese buyer has purchased the donkey, they do not know how to tame a wild animal, so they choose to mistreat the suffering animals by illegal methods such as dragging, kicking, and the use of spiked sticks. They also chose to not provide any access to food, water, and rest causing the estimated 20% of animals dying while on the bus. 

Since the production of ejiao demands over about five million skins a year, the Chinese industry would consume more than half of the world’s current population of current donkeys in the next five years to meet their needs. With this collapse in population, the livelihoods in Ghana of an estimated 500 million people in the world’s most impoverished communities will suffer in their everyday life with no animal support. Also, as Chinese buyers continue to sell untreated and cleansed skins across the black market, they are at a potentially high risk of spreading contagious diseases from the animal that the skin. To prevent these major risk factors, The Donkey Sanctuary is asking businesses that produce ejiao to stop global skin trade and try other sources for natural materials created by cellular agriculture. They are also proposing that the Chinese Government postpones the trading market of donkeys and their merchandise until further notice that they are both disease-free and safe for humanity. 

The course theme that relates to this briefing would be to explain how the interconnected nature of global problems and their impact on economic development. Over the past several decades, the production of donkeys has majorly impacted both Ghana and China economically; because these two countries are both dependent on this animal, the existence of the donkey population is slowly decaying and soon will no longer exist. With this being said, both countries are competing against each other to gain more profit economically through China’s booming market and Ghana’s transportation system. 

Discussion Questions:

- Which country do you believe will economically thrive through the donkey trade and should gain leverage on the production of this valued animal? 

- If the donkeys are not saved from being slaughtered at an accelerating rate, what may occur between these two countries economically? Will stock markets fall out of balance? 

- Which country will have the worst impact on its economy if these animals become extinct and why?