EU Sharks Back On The Line

 After months of wrangling, the EU Fisheries Commission is set to finalise new regulations on shark
“finning” next week, but conservationists in the UK say that they may as well not have bothered.

 Finning involves the removal of a shark’s fins, often while it is still living, and the discarding of the
body at sea. The practice became widespread in the 1980s as a result of rapid economic growth in
east Asia, which permitted mass consumption of shark fin soup, previously reserved for the very
wealthy. The resulting escalation in the price of fins created an incentive to harvest fins from sharks that, in the past, were often
returned alive to the sea. The far less valuable body takes up too much room on board ship and is discarded. It is widely believed
that this is the fate of many millions of sharks every year.

 Conservation groups, concerned about the rapid depletion of shark populations worldwide, have spent two years attempting to
persuade the EU to ban the practice, which wastes up to 95% of the shark. “But in the course of discussions the proposed
regulations have been progressively watered down, and the Commission is now poised to sign off on a set of regulations that
are, essentially, pointless” said Susie Watts of the international wildlife organisation WildAid.

 Initially, conservationists had lobbied for a regulation stipulating that only whole sharks could be landed. This was rejected,
mainly at the insistence of Spain (by far the world’s largest shark fin producer).  The fall-back position was that masters of
EU-registered vessels could apply for a “special fishing permit” to allow them to continue removing fins on board and to land
fins separately from bodies, provided that they were landed simultaneously and that the weight of the fins did not exceed 5%
of the weight of the headless and gutted sharks.

 It now seems that even the stronger proponents of shark conservation, including the UK, Belgium and Germany, have lost on
this point, too. The current compromise allows fins to be landed anywhere in the world, without the corresponding carcasses.
The only stipulation is that records of the number of sharks caught and weights of the various body parts sold are entered
into the vessels’ logbooks.

 Conservationists fear that the practice of throwing finned sharks overboard will simply carry on as normal. “The effectiveness of
this compromise regulation rests entirely on the integrity of the crew” says Sarah Fowler, an internationally-renowned shark
specialist who is a Trustee of the UK-based Shark Trust. “The EU is effectively handing over the keys of the hen-house to the
foxes. How they can call this a ‘regulation’ is beyond me”.

 Conservationists are alarmed by the contribution that shark finning makes to the global decline in shark populations. Recent
research has revealed that some shark populations in the North-west Atlantic have declined by as much as 90% in the past 15
years. This is now a familiar pattern all over the world.

 “The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has recognised shark declines not only as a threat to ecosystems but also as a major
food security problem” says Susie Watts, “but the EU is totally ignoring the FAO’s recommendations on minimising waste. Sharks
play a key role in their ecosystems, coastal communities around the world depend on them for protein and they’re disappearing
fast. But the Commission seems to think that it’s fine to carry on throwing them away”.