NAIROBI, Kenya: Dawn was just beginning to break when Joseph Kamonjo Kariuki woke to find his donkeys missing. The villager searched the bush frantically for the animals he depends on to deliver water for a living, but they were nowhere to be found.
It was the village’s children who led Kariuki to the ghastly remains: three bloody, severed donkey heads lying on the ground.
“I was in shock,” said Kariuki, 37, who is known in his Kenyan village of Naivasha as “Jose wa Mapunda” — “Joseph of the Donkeys” in Swahili.
Kariuki believes his donkeys were the latest victims of a black market for donkey skins, the key ingredient in a Chinese health fad that’s threatening the beasts of burden many Africans rely on for farm work and transporting heavy loads.
From Kenya to Burkina Faso, Egypt to Nigeria, animal rights groups say, agents are seeking to feed China’s insatiable appetite for a gelatin they call ejiao (pronounced “uh-jee-ow“), made from stewed donkey skins that purports to provide health benefits.
Shrinking donkey herds in China have driven ejiao producers to seek out donkey skins from Africa, Australia and South America, threatening the world’s donkey population and driving violent crime and protests across Africa, the activists say.
Kariuki founded a protest group “Tunza Punda Wako” or “Take Care of Your Donkey” in Swahili. They’ve picketed the abattoir in Naivasha, accusing it of driving the skin thefts.
“At this rate we will tell our children that donkeys once existed,” he said.
Fourteen African governments have banned the export of donkey skins, according to the UK-based animal welfare group Donkey Sanctuary.
In Kenya, the donkey population has fallen in the past nine years by a third — from 1.8 million to 1.2 million. Kenya’s three licensed slaughterhouses butcher 1,000 donkeys a day to supply skins to China, said Calvin Onyango, program development manager of the Donkey Sanctuary Kenya.
“We do not have many donkeys and most people do not want to sell their donkeys. So to keep supplying these slaughterhouses, we have ended up with businesspeople or brokers stealing other people’s donkeys to supply the slaughterhouses,” Onyango said.
Onyango said that the rate at which donkeys were being slaughtered meant that there could be none left in five years.
From Kenya, the donkey hides travel thousands of kilometers (miles) to China. Many of them end up in an eastern town called Dong’e, where most of the world’s ejiao is made.
On the road into Dong’e, billboard after billboard proclaims the purported curative powers of the gelatin.
“Ejiao, eat for a long life, lose weight, and get more energy,” reads a slogan printed on the side of a hotel dedicated to gelatin tourism.
Farmers raise hundreds of donkeys in metal-roofed dirt paddocks surrounding the town. Most donkeys at three farms The Associated Press visited were tagged with the initials of the Dong’e Ejiao Corporation Limited, or DEEJ, the nation’s largest producer of donkey gelatin.
The company processes about 1 million skins a year and makes up 63 percent of the ejiao market, according to the Forward Industry Research Institute, a Chinese market research firm. DEEJ says in its latest annual report that its profits rose 10 percent to $313 million last year.
DEEJ president Qin Yufeng declined to be interviewed but sent a statement to the AP saying ejiao has benefited more than 20,000 poor households in 1,000 towns.
Qin said the soaring demand for ejiao isn’t the reason that donkey populations are shrinking. Rather, fewer donkeys are being bred, he wrote, because they’ve been increasingly replaced by machines on farms.
Guo Fanli, an economist in the southern city of Shenzhen, said Qin and DEEJ have inflated ejiao’s value by marketing what was typically used for what was believed to be its blood-boosting properties as something with far wider benefits to body health and beauty.
“By enriching the cultural meaning of ejiao, and overstating its actual effects, the company has successfully made it into a health product with multiple uses that can be bought as a gift,” Guo said.
“The more it has been hyped, the more miserably it could fall,” he said.
Others have echoed skepticism of ejiao’s uses. China’s government health agency said ejiao marketing was based on “superstitious concepts.”
“Donkey hide is just ‘boiled donkey skin,’” the commission said in a February statement on the micro-blogging site, Sina Weibo. The commission took down the post after an uproar among traditional medicine enthusiasts.
One such advocate is Fu Yanlin, a professor at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, who says he often prescribes ejiao to the 100 patients he sees a week for urinary, cardiovascular, gynecological and other ailments.
The surge in ejiao demand has driven the price of donkey hides up by nearly five times — from $78 per hide in 2010 to $405 in 2015, according to the Shandong Ejiao Association. China’s donkey population, meanwhile, has halved from 9.4 million in 1996 to 5.5 million in 2015, according to Chinese state media, driving producers to look abroad.
In response to the surging demand, state-built donkey abattoirs have sprung up in the African nations of Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Botswana. Niger’s hide exports tripled. Botswana slaughtered 3 percent of its total donkey population in six months, according the Donkey Sanctuary.
More than 2 million of the world’s 44 million donkeys are killed for their skins every year, according to Donkey Sanctuary.
In rural parts of western Zimbabwe, there are often more donkeys than cars on the roads. Farmers like the Chingodza family are resisting market pressure to sell their donkeys, vital for farm work and transportation to the biggest nearby town, Seke, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside of Harare.
“I like my donkeys. They help a lot and are dear to me,” said Jeffrey Chingodza, 65, as he put a yoke on a donkey. “I won’t sell for export to Chinese abattoirs,” he said.
His son 20-year old son Tawanda, however, said surging prices are tempting.
“When you have a car and you get the first buyer saying ‘I will give you $3,000 for it and the second buyer says I will give you $6,000,’ what would you do?” Tawanda said. “I will definitely sell. All of us want money.”
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McNeil reported from Dong’e, China. Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed from Beijing, writer Farai Mutsaka from Seke, Zimbabwe, and video journalist Desmond Tiro from Nairobi, Kenya.
Donkeys stolen, skinned in Africa to feed Chinese demand
Donkeys stolen, skinned in Africa to feed Chinese demand
- From Kenya to Burkina Faso, Egypt to Nigeria, animal rights groups say, agents are seeking to feed China’s insatiable appetite for a gelatin they call ejiao (pronounced “uh-jee-ow“), made from stewed donkey skins that purports to provide health benefits.
- Shrinking donkey herds in China have driven ejiao producers to seek out donkey skins from Africa, Australia and South America, threatening the world’s donkey population and driving violent crime and protests across Africa, the activists say.
Pakistani province declares health emergency due to smog and locks down two cities
- Smog has choked Punjab for weeks, sickening nearly 2 million people and shrouding vast swathes of the province in a toxic haze
- Average air quality index readings in parts of Lahore exceeded 600 on Friday
LAHORE, Pakistan: A Pakistani province declared a health emergency Friday due to smog and imposed a shutdown in two major cities.
Smog has choked Punjab for weeks, sickening nearly 2 million people and shrouding vast swathes of the province in a toxic haze.
A senior provincial minister, Marriyum Aurangzeb, declared the health emergency at a press conference and announced measures to combat the growing crisis.
Time off for medical staff is canceled, all education institutions are shut until further notice, restaurants are closing at 4 p.m. while takeaway is available up until 8 p.m. Authorities are imposing a lockdown in the cities of Multan and Lahore and halting construction work in those two places.
“Smog is currently a national disaster,” Aurangzeb said. “It will not all be over in a month or a year. We will evaluate the situation after three days and then announce a further strategy.”
Average air quality index readings in parts of Lahore, a city of 11 million, exceeded 600 on Friday. Anything over 300 is considered hazardous to health.
The dangerous smog is a byproduct of large numbers of vehicles, construction and industrial work as well as burning crops at the start of the winter wheat-planting season, experts say.
Pakistan’s national weather center said rain and wind were forecast for the coming days, helping smoggy conditions to subside and air quality to improve in parts of Punjab.
Dr. Muhammad Ashraf, a professor at Jinnah Hospital Lahore and Allama Iqbal Medical College, said the government must take preventative measures well before smog becomes prevalent.
“It is more of an emergency than COVID-19 because every patient is suffering from respiratory tract infections and disease is prevailing at a mass level,” he said earlier this week.
Sri Lankan president’s leftist coalition secures landslide election win
- National People’s Power alliance wins 159 seats in the 225-member parliament
- First time in history, election is won by representatives of Sri Lanka’s poor
COLOMBO: The coalition of Sri Lanka’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake won a landslide victory in a snap parliamentary vote, results from the election body showed on Friday, giving the left-leaning leader a mandate to fight poverty and corruption in the crisis-hit island nation.
Dissanayake’s alliance, the National People’s Power, secured 159 seats in the 225-member assembly, according to the results released by the Election Commission.
The United People’s Power of Sajith Premadasa retained its role from the previous parliament as the largest opposition party, winning 40 seats.
When Dissanayake won the presidential vote in September, he had only three members of his party in parliament, which limited his ability to realize his campaign promises.
To boost the NPP’s representation — as government ministers can be appointed only from among lawmakers — he dissolved the parliament and cleared the way for the polls that took place on Thursday, a year ahead of schedule.
While ahead of the poll, the president expressed optimism that the 42 percent of the vote he received in the presidential election showed the NPP was “a winning party,” the landslide win came with a surprise.
“It’s a historic election,” Lakshman Gunasekara, a political analyst in Colombo, told Arab News. “The result has gone far beyond the expectations of analysts ... I did not expect them to win a total majority, but they have done so.”
Dissanayake and his coalition took over control of Sri Lanka as the nation continued to reel from the 2022 economic crisis — its worst since independence in 1948. The austerity measures imposed by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe — part of a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund — led to price hikes in food and fuel and caused hardship to millions of Sri Lankans.
Dissanayake said during his campaign that he planned to renegotiate the targets set in the IMF deal, as it placed too much burden on the ordinary people.
More than half of former lawmakers chose not to run for re-election. No contenders were seen from the powerful Rajapaksa family, including former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, also former president, Gotabaya — who was ousted in 2022 and largely blamed for the crisis.
Sri Lanka People’s Front, the party loyal to the Rajapaksa family, secured only three seats in the new parliament.
Sri Lankans decided to choose the NPP, a movement that until now would never win more than 4 percent, as there was a general “anti-incumbency kind of mood, but also tiredness among the voters of the same old parties alternating and doing political mismanagement, whipping up ethnic chauvinism, encouraging attacks on minorities to cover up for their own corruption,” Gunasekara said.
He explained that even more voted for the NPP than for Dissanayake in the presidential vote, as during slightly over one month of his and his three-member cabinet’s rule, they “realized that this new leadership is very fresh in their style of governance, very collective ... not personality-oriented, and also did not resort to violence or bullying or thuggery.”
Both Dissanayake and most of his party members come from the poorest segments of Sri Lankan society.
“He’s a son of a farmer, benefited from free education ... He’s an educated person, but coming from the lowest classes, not from the urban elite, not the urban middle class, the Westernized people, fashionable people, not at all,” Gunasekara said.
“It will be a new entrant into the South Asian political arena ... For the first time, we have subalterns who have arrived in power. And they have arrived with a huge majority.”
Primary schools empty as smog persists in India’s capital New Delhi
- New Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter
- The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for residents
NEW DELHI: Residents in India’s capital New Delhi again woke under a blanket of choking smog on Friday, a day after authorities closed primary schools and imposed measures aimed at alleviating the annual crisis.
Delhi and the surrounding metropolitan area, home to more than 30 million people, consistently tops world rankings for air pollution in winter.
The smog is blamed for thousands of premature deaths each year and is an annual source of misery for residents, with various piecemeal government initiatives failing to measurably address the problem.
All primary schools were shut by government order on Thursday night with young pupils – particularly vulnerable to smog-related ailments due to their age – instead moving to online lessons.
“I have an eight-year-old kid and he has been suffering from a cough the past couple of days,” Delhi resident Satraj, who did not give his surname, said on the streets of the capital.
“The government did the right thing by shutting down schools.”
Thursday’s edict also banned construction work, ordered drivers of older diesel-powered vehicles to stay off the streets and directed water trucks to spray roads in a bid to clear dust particles from the air.
Delhi’s air quality nonetheless deteriorated to “hazardous” levels for the fourth consecutive day this week, according to monitoring firm IQAir.
Levels of PM2.5 pollutants – dangerous cancer-causing microparticles that enter the bloodstream through the lungs – were recorded more than 26 times above the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum shortly after dawn on Friday.
Critics have consistently said that authorities have fallen short in their duty to tackle a crisis that blights the city each year.
“We haven’t responded to the emergency with the same intensity with which we are facing this crisis,” Sunil Dahiya of New Delhi-based advocacy group Envirocatalysts said.
The acrid smog over New Delhi each year is primarily blamed on stubble burning by farmers in nearby states to clear their fields for plowing.
A report by broadcaster NDTV on Friday said that more than 7,000 individual farm fires had been recorded in Punjab state, to the capital’s north.
Emissions from industry and numerous coal-fired power stations ringing the city, along with vehicle exhaust and the burning of household waste, also play a part.
“Since we haven’t yet carried out any systemic long-term changes, like the way we commute, generate power, or manage our waste, even the curtailed emissions will be high,” Dahiya said.
Cooler temperatures and slow-moving winds worsen the situation by trapping deadly pollutants each winter.
A study in The Lancet medical journal attributed 1.67 million premature deaths to air pollution in the world’s most populous country in 2019.
World’s most polluting cities revealed at COP29 as frustration grows at fossil fuel presence
- Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, and Shanghai is the most polluting
- That’s according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence to quantify emissions around the world
BAKU: Cities in Asia and the United States emit the most heat-trapping gas that feeds climate change, with Shanghai the most polluting, according to new data that combines observations and artificial intelligence.
Nations at UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan are trying to set new targets to cut such emissions and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task. The data comes as climate officials and activists alike are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as the talks’ — and the world’s — inability to clamp down on planet-warming fossil fuels and the countries and companies that promote them.
Seven states or provinces spew more than 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, all of them in China, except Texas, which ranks sixth, according to new data from an organization co-founded by former US Vice President Al Gore and released Friday at COP29.
Using satellite and ground observations, supplemented by artificial intelligence to fill in gaps, Climate Trace sought to quantify heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, as well as other traditional air pollutants worldwide, including for the first time in more than 9,000 urban areas.
Earth’s total carbon dioxide and methane pollution grew 0.7 percent to 61.2 billion metric tons with the short-lived but extra potent methane rising 0.2 percent. The figures are higher than other datasets “because we have such comprehensive coverage and we have observed more emissions in more sectors than are typically available,” said Gavin McCormick, Climate Trace’s co-founder.
Plenty of big cities emit far more than some nations
Shanghai’s 256 million metric tons of greenhouse gases led all cities and exceeded those from the nations of Colombia or Norway. Tokyo’s 250 million metric tons would rank in the top 40 of nations if it were a country, while New York City’s 160 million metric tons and Houston’s 150 million metric tons would be in the top 50 of countrywide emissions. Seoul, South Korea, ranks fifth among cities at 142 million metric tons.
“One of the sites in the Permian Basin in Texas is by far the No. 1 worst polluting site in the entire world,” Gore said. “And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, but I think of how dirty some of these sites are in Russia and China and so forth. But Permian Basin is putting them all in the shade.”
China, India, Iran, Indonesia and Russia had the biggest increases in emissions from 2022 to 2023, while Venezuela, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States had the biggest decreases in pollution.
The dataset — maintained by scientists and analysts from various groups — also looked at traditional pollutants such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, ammonia, sulfur dioxide and other chemicals associated with dirty air. Burning fossil fuels releases both types of pollution, Gore said.
This “represents the single biggest health threat facing humanity,” Gore said.
Climate talks wrestle with fossil fuel interests
Gore criticized the hosting of climate talks, called COPs, by Azerbaijan, an oil nation and site of the world’s first oil wells, and by the United Arab Emirates last year.
“It’s unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree,” Gore said. “Next year in Brazil, we’ll see a change in that pattern. But, you know, it’s not good for the world community to give the No. 1 polluting industry in the world that much control over the whole process.”
Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called for more to be done on climate change and has sought to slow deforestation since returning for a third term as president. But Brazil last year produced more oil than both Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
On Friday, former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, former UN climate chief Christina Figueres and leading climate scientists released a letter calling for “an urgent overhaul” on climate talks.
The letter said the “global climate process has been captured and is no longer fit for purpose” in response to Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev saying that oil and gas are a “gift of the gods.”
UN Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andresen said she understands much of the frustration in the letter calling for massive reform of the negotiation process, but said their push to slash emissions fits nicely with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ constant prodding.
One key benefit of the UN climate talks process is it is the only place where victim small island nations have an equal seat at the table, Andersen told The Associated Press. But the process has its limits because “the rules of the game are set by member states,” she said.
An analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition said Friday that the official attendance list of the talks featured at least 1,770 fossil fuel lobbyists.
At a press conference with small island nations chair Cedric Schuster said the negotiating bloc feels the need to remind everyone else why the talks matter.
“We’re here to defend the Paris agreement,” Schuster said, referring to the climate deal in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). “We’re concerned that countries are forgetting that protecting the world’s most vulnerable is at the core of this framework.”
Daesh group gunmen kill politician in Pakistan
- Attackers escaped after shooting the Islamist politician in Bajaur district, near the border with Afghanistan where militants remain active
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Gunmen from the regional branch of the Daesh group have killed a politician in northwest Pakistan, police and the militants said Friday.
“Jamaat-e-Islami Bajaur leader Sufi Hameed was leaving the mosque after offering prayers after sunset (Thursday) when two masked men on a motorcycle opened fire on him,” senior police official Waqar Rafiq said.
The official said the attackers escaped after shooting the Islamist politician in Bajaur district, near the border with Afghanistan where militants remain active.
Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) said its “soldiers shot an official of the apostate political party,” in a message on Telegram.
The local chapter of the Daesh group accuses religious political parties of going against strict religious preachings and supporting the country’s government and the military.
IS-K has recently carried out several attacks against political parties, including a suicide bomb blast at a rally in Bajaur last year which killed at least 54 people including 23 children.
“In this year alone, they have killed at least 39 people in targeted attacks and bomb explosions” in Bajaur, a senior local security official said on the condition of anonymity.
In both Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Bajuar is located, and Balochistan province in the southwest, armed Islamist or separatist groups regularly target security forces and state representatives.
Militants operating in Pakistan include Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the country’s homegrown Taliban group.
Pakistan has seen a sharp rise in militant attacks in regions bordering Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in the country in 2021.
