[Translation from Portuguese to English provided by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

“Under the skin of the donkey”, December 11, 2019

... Donkeys began to disappear from sight after an unusual deal with China. The Asian country is mainly interested in the animal leather - the raw material for the production of Donkey-hide gelatin, used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics ... [For] more than a year, thousands have been subjected to degrading conditions and slaughtered with rigor ... Not even the Minister of Agriculture at the time, Kátia Abreu, believed in the request made to her during a trip to Asia in 2015. "It seemed like a joke", she wrote on Twitter about a Chinese businessman interested in importing donkeys. "Unbelievable, but the demand was for 1 million donkeys [per] year" ... If the slaughter rate reaches Chinese expectations, the species may disappear in less than five years in the Northeast [of Brazil] ... There is no structured production, breeding norms, transportation inspections or measures against precarious conditions; nor a recent census of the population ...Until September, no Brazilian company was qualified to export donkeys to China - recently, the refrigeration company Frinordeste, owned by Amargosa, received permission. For this reason, shipping was carried out by logistics companies in Vietnam and Hong Kong - the fifth group of middlemen. HL Vietnam International and Fortune Freight (FFC International) bought the cargo of refrigerators - between R $ 300 and R $ 400 each animal - and dispatched it at the port of Salvador ... In November 2018, after complaints, Justice systems of Bahia prohibited the slaughter. But business pressure overthrew the injunction in September this year ... Three Chinese citizens and a Brazilian national from Cuifeng Lin were coordinating the arrival of loaded trucks in the period when the slaughter was suspended in court ... With Frinordeste's permission to sell the production directly to China, the expectation is that the market will reheat ... Frinordeste did not grant an interview. The owner of the slaughterhouse Cabra Forte (in Simões Filho), Reginaldo Filho, stated that the sector's lack of legal security led him to give up the activity. “We turned that page”, he guaranteed.