Exporters of frogs’ legs warned

Press, 7 February 1985, Page 17

Exporters of frogs’ legs warned

NZPA-AP Geneva Bangladesh and India, exporters of frogs’ legs, may be headed for “ecological catastrophe” because they are killing off a vital link in the ecological chain, said an article in the World Wildlife Fund newspaper.

More than 200 million wild frogs were killed for their legs in 1984 — threequarters of them in Bangladesh and India, the article said.

It said conservationists believe the ecological threat is most acute in Bangladesh, where 70 million frogs are killed annually for export. That number of frogs would normally eat several hundred tonnes of insects daily, including mosquitos, and their removal “may cause an increase in malaria as well as create an imbalance in the ecosystem," the article said.

It quoted recent studies in Bangladesh as saying agricultural pests, tree-damag-ing insects and household pests made up more than one-third of the usual diet of the Indian bullfrog, a type killed for its legs. Bangladesh has begun importing insecticides including D.D.T. to fight pests normally controlled by frogs, it said. The W.W.F.’s Swiss chapter reported in December that Bangladesh spent 35 million Swiss francs (over $29.58 million) on pesticides in 1983, while its farmers earned only 15 million francs (about $12.7 million) from frogs’ legs. In Bangladesh, frogs are collected in the spring by local people who hack the legs off the animals while they are still alive, the W.W.F. article said. The legs are then frozen and shipped abroad, it said.

Bangladesh locals do not normally eat the delicacy but can earn up to $2 a night selling them to exporters, the article said.

Frogs’ legs from India and Bangladesh end up primarily on dinner tables in Europe, Australia and the United States.

W.W.F. organisations in West Germany and Switzerland have appealed to national hotel and restaurant industries to stop serving the delicacy. In Switzerland, where indigenous frogs are a protected species, restaurantgoers eat 250 tonnes of imported frogs’ legs from five million frogs annually. In West Germany, which annually imports 1100 tonnes of frog legs, representing 12 million frogs, from Bangladesh, 250 hotel and restaurant owners have pledged to stop serving the dish.