France’s love of frog legs imperils species, report says
Conservation groups urge leaders to regulate as if animal is endangered
There are few things more French in the public imagination than frog legs, but a group of scientists has warned France to bring its consumption of the oftsautéed delicacy under more stringent regulation.
The global harvest and trade in frog legs is poorly tracked and could be leading to species decline in countries such as Indonesia and Turkey, signatories said in an open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron.
Between 2010 and 2019, the European Union imported the legs of up to about 2 billion frogs, according to a study in Nature Conservation. Over that period, France imported 30,015 tons of frog legs.
France’s official tourism website cites frog legs, or cuisses de grenouille, with butter and parsley as “an iconic French dish, controversial yes, but in the end, enjoyed the world over.”
The letter to Macron was signed by European conservation organizations Pro Wildlife, Robin des Bois, and Veterinarians for Biodiversity, and included scientists from Cambridge and Oxford.
They urged France to take steps to bring frog legs under the control of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a global treaty that regulates trade in animals and animal parts. “Recent field studies indicate that several species and populations are already experiencing a significant decline,” the letter’s authors wrote.
The majority of frog legs sold to the European Union, with France the biggest consumer, are collected from the wild, according to a report published last year by the CITES secretariat.
The group’s report noted that there was poor data and recordkeeping of the global trade in frogs outside the United States and that the species are often not identified. It also said Indonesia is the biggest source of frog legs sold in the EU.
But Mirza D. Kusrini, a professor of forest resources conservation at Indonesia’s IPB University who has studied the impact of exports of frog legs on local species, said by phone that she does not share the concerns raised in the letter.
The two most common species harvested have stable populations despite the “millions and millions” collected from the wild each year, she said her research shows. They breed year-round and thrive in rice paddies, she added.
“I don’t believe that most Indonesian scientists would agree with the letter,” she said.
The letter to Macron mentions the two species she studied and one other, all found in Indonesia and none of which is endangered. It also pointed to a study of Anatolian water frog populations in Turkey, a species listed as vulnerable. The study found that the frog’s numbers were dropping 20 percent per year because of overharvesting for international export.
“Frog populations native to France and the EU are protected against commercial exploitation; the EU should no longer permit the overexploitation of frog species and populations in the major supplying countries,” the scientists wrote.
Jodi Rowley, herpetology department lead at the Australian Museum and at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said there is a lack of information on the international harvesting and trade of frogs.
“There is this global trade in amphibians, which can certainly be nonsustainable,” she said. “When things come under the control of CITES, at least, you can actually look at the numbers and regulate it a little bit more.”
Amphibians are the most threatened class of vertebrates globally, with more species battling for survival than mammals, birds, and reptiles, though this is for several reasons including the global spread of the deadly chytrid fungus.
‘There is this global trade in amphibians, which can certainly be nonsustainable.’ JODI ROWLEY
Herpetologist, University of
New South Wales