The value of donkeys to livelihood provision in northern Ghana

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE The value of donkeys to livelihood provision in northern Ghana Heather C. Maggs ID*, Andrew Ainslie, Richard M. Bennett School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Maggs HC, Ainslie A, Bennett RM (2023) The value of donkeys to livelihood provision in northern Ghana. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0274337. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274337 Editor: László Vasa, Szechenyi Istvan University: Szechenyi Istvan Egyetem, HUNGARY Received: July 13, 2021 Accepted: August 25, 2022 Published: February 22, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Maggs et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from: Maggs, Heather (2022): Data supporting ‘The value of donkeys to livelihood provision in northern Ghana’. University of Reading. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.000408. Funding: This research was funded by The Donkey Sanctuary, a U.K. charity/NGO, grant number F4105400. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abstract Increased demand for the supply of donkey hides for use in the Traditional Chinese Medicine e’jiao, is leading to a re-appraisal of donkeys’ contributions to livelihoods across the world. This research aimed to understand the utilitarian value donkeys provide to poor small holder farmers, especially women, in their efforts to make a living in two rural communities in northern Ghana. Uniquely, children and donkey butchers were interviewed for the first time about their donkeys. A qualitative thematic analysis was undertaken of data disaggregated by sex, age and donkey-ownership. The majority of protocols were repeated during a second visit, ensuring comparative data between one wet, and one dry season. Donkeys are more important in people’s lives than had previously been recognised and are highly valued by their owners for their help in reducing drudgery and the multi-functional services they offer. Hiring out donkeys to generate income is a secondary role for people who own donkeys, especially women. However, for financial and cultural reasons the way donkeys are kept results in the loss of a certain percentage of the animals to the donkey meat market, as well as the global hides trade. Increasing demand for donkey meat, coupled with increasing demand for donkeys for farming, is leading to donkey price inflation and theft of donkeys. This is putting pressure on the donkey population of neighbouring Burkina Faso and pricing resource-poor non-donkey owners out of the market. E’jiao has put the spotlight on the value of dead donkeys for the first time, especially to governments and middlemen. This study shows that the value of live donkeys to poor farming households is substantial. It attempts to understand and document this value thoroughly, should the majority of donkeys in West Africa be rounded up and slaughtered for the value of their meat and skin instead. Introduction Donkeys were once status symbols [2], lauded as the drivers of the development of ancient civilizations [3, 4]. As the first domesticated transport animal [3] donkeys have been used by humans for millennia for draught animal power. There is no one literature relating to donkeys. Academic papers relating to donkeys include intermediate transport [5–7], draught animal power [8–10], the clinical veterinary, health and welfare disciplines [11–14] and, increasingly donkey commodities [15–19]. There are also a number of papers specifically about donkeys in Ghana, including transport [20], draught animal power [21, 22], gender [5, 7, 10], livelihoods PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274337 February 22, 2023 1 / 30 PLOS ONE The value of donkeys to livelihood provision in northern Ghana [10] and welfare [23]. However, most papers do not specify the core intrinsic or extrinsic value of donkeys from other elements of their instrumental value, including power provision and portage for example [5] or power provision and livelihoods [20, 23]. A further section of papers is not donkey specific, but have a different focus, for example on draught animal power or working equids [24–26]. These papers include information on donkeys only if data was collected about them—within a livestock assessment for example. However, the use of donkeys in a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) called e’jiao has also taken place across millennia [16, 27]. E’jiao’s constituent ingredient is extracted from boiling donkey skins in water. Originally reserved for the use of the emperor and the wealthy, demand for e’jiao has increased steeply since the 1990s, due to the growth in Chinese disposable income and clever promotion of both TCM and e’jiao [16, 27]. E’jiao is now a “coveted luxury product for ostentatious consumption” [27:1], with new indications for use and astute product development contributing to increasing demand [16, 27]. E’jiao manufacturers have reported they need between four to ten million donkey skins a year [27], outstripping the ability of China to meet demand from its own donkey population, which stood at ~2.3m in 2020m [28]. This requirement has led to a corresponding increase in the demand for donkey hides from around the world, resulting in an increase in the price of e’jiao, donkeys and donkey hides. As Bennett and Pfuderer [16:3] make clear the e’jiao industry “has far reaching global implications for donkey populations.” A 2017 report entitled “Under the Skin,” by a UK charitable non-governmental organisation, the Donkey Sanctuary [29], brought these issues to a much wider, global audience. This report resulted from the increasing awareness amongst the Sanctuary’s network of global partners of the potential impacts the donkey hide trade could have on donkey populations and their welfare. The report established the issues facing donkeys and their owners/users as important problems to be addressed. It has also initiated interest in donkeys from academia, development agencies and international NGOs [1, 30, 31], signalling a change in the direction of the traditional narrative of the valueless donkey. Bough [3] argues that the domesticated donkey lost its reputation and status as ancient trade routes facilitated the spread of donkeys to the Near East, the Mediterranean, India and China. Thus, donkeys have become associated with poor people [7, 13, 30, 32], who don’t tend to write history. While a majority of studies prior to 2017 conclude that donkeys have little value through many (...truncated)