Frog farmers make appeal to keep their livelihoods from croaking

[dufus]

Frog breeders say their businesses have been unfairly caught up in a ban on the trading and consumption of wild animals. 

 

The frog farming industry in China is thought to be worth $7.15 billion. Photo: Shutterstock

 

 

Frog breeders in southern China have appealed to authorities to allow them to keep rearing the animals despite a national ban on the wildlife trade triggered by the coronavirus epidemic.

 

“The government’s forestry department has banned the trading of all wild animals, including our 11,000 tons of domesticated [East Asian bullfrogs]. Where do we go from here?” wrote a group of breeders from Jiangmen in the southern province of Guangdong. It included the names and phone numbers of more than 100 signatories.

 

“Frog farming is no longer a source of living. The government asked us to try something else. What are we capable of doing?” they said, adding that the industry employed 10,000 people in one county in the province.

 

On the southern island of Hainan, a petition was signed by more than 700 people, also urging officials to consider the economic impact of shutting down an industry that it said employed around 6,000 people and involved around 9,000 tons of livestock.

 

“First of all, we are not breeding wildlife,” the group said. “Second, [farming frogs] can protect and repair the environment. Third, it gives farmers in Hainan a long-term solution in the development of the rural economy.”

 

Chinese farmers began breeding East Asian bullfrogs, also called Thai tiger frogs, as a source of food in the 1980s.

 

A 2017 report by the Chinese Academy of Engineering estimated that frog breeding employed about 1 million people in a $7.15 billion business in 2016. 

 

And in some of China’s most impoverished regions, such as Guangxi in the south, wildlife breeding is a key poverty alleviation strategy.

 

 The Chinese standing committee outlawed the trade and consumption of wildlife as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: Xinhua/Li Xueren

 

Last week, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top lawmaking body, passed a resolution banning the trade and consumption of wild animals as a response to the coronavirus epidemic.

 

The illness has killed nearly 3,000 people in China and is believed to have originated in wild animals. 

 

The committee also indicated that changes to wildlife protection laws would follow.

 

Chen Weiwen, one of those who signed the Guangdong petition, said he had not heard back from the authorities.

 

“I am in despair,” Chen said. “I don’t know what to do. I hope everything will return to normal.”

 

He said he had not been able to sell any of his inventory and he risked losing nearly $11,500, almost all of his earnings.

 

“How do I change what I do now?” Chen said. “This is my 12th year [being a frog breeder]. I have a sizeable business and I am not a new guy. What we do is safe and we also eat what we breed.”

 

The origins of the coronavirus outbreak has been linked to a seafood market in Wuhan that sold wild animals. Photo: AFP/Noel Celis

 

Frog farmers in China have been voicing their concerns about losing their livelihood in the aftermath of the ban. 

 

In February, a group of defiant frog breeders on a subcommittee of the China Wildlife Conservation Association, an umbrella trade group, made their case against the ban in an online article arguing that it was part of a valuable tradition.

 

The frog breeders drew parallels with other animal-related disease outbreaks such as avian flu, mad cow disease and African swine fever, arguing that the banning of farming and eating farmed frogs was unnecessary. 

 

But the umbrella association – which says it promotes the sustainable development of the trade – quickly issued a public apology for the frog breeders’ comments and disbanded the subcommittee that released the article.

 

Some of the earliest coronavirus infections were found in people who had exposure to a wildlife market in Hubei’s provincial capital Wuhan, where bats, snakes, civets and other animals were sold.

 

As a result there has been growing support to ban the trading and consumption of wild animals. 

 

In Shenzhen, China’s southern technology hub, the government is already moving to outlaw the eating of dogs and cats, permitting nine meats for consumption, including pork, chicken, beef and rabbit, as well as seafood.

 

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