Colombian Navy Trains Its Sights On Shark Hunters

January 2, 2007

Release from: Andy Webb-Vidal
Financial Times Deutschland

Anti-drugs taskforce is fighting a new war against the irregular and growing trade in fins. A single bowl of some varieties of shark fin soup can sell for over $150 in top Chinese restaurants.

Eighty-three nautical miles from the Colombian port of Buenaventura, Navy Captain Luis Rodríguez and his crew have spotted the José Rodolfo, a rickety fishing boat adrift on the Pacific Ocean.

A unit of armed marines boards the creaking wooden vessel, weighed down low in the rolling sea with a possible shipment of contraband. But what they find is not a couple of tonnes of cocaine, a cargo they routinely encounter. It looks like a grisly crime scene: scores of fins and 14 dead hammerhead sharks are strewn about the blood-spattered deck of the José Rodolfo. The crew is pulled aboard the 3,500-tonne Colombian navy logistics ship for questioning.

"Unfortunately, we can't do anything about these shark fins they have aboard, as it's not against the law," Capt Rodríguez says. "But we are going to ask them to report to the port captain in Buenaventura on a technicality, only because they don't have the right number of life-jackets on board. That's all we can do."

The Colombian navy's Pacific taskforce still devotes its time to the hot pursuit of cocaine traffickers on the high seas, yet it is now also struggling in a new battle: an undeclared war against the irregular and growing trade in shark fins.

Capt Rodríguez and his crew patrol the deep blue waters near the Colombian island of Malpelo, an expanse of sea brimming with so many hammerhead sharks that at times the water's surface froths like a Jacuzzi.

It is no relaxing dip for the Colombian navy, though, which is unofficially fighting one front of what conservationists claim is a global business that kills 100m sharks a year to feed Asia's appetite for shark fin soup.

It is a lucrative business, estimated to be worth at least $1bn a year. It is also a secretive one, with the rumoured involvement of Chinese Triad gangs. A single bowl of some varieties of shark fin soup, a delicacy bestowing status, can sell for over $150 in top Chinese restaurants while dried shark fin can fetch $800 a kilogramme in Hong Kong, the hub of the global trade. So valuable is the food that some Asian travellers have recently been spotted at Bogotá airport with shark fins stuffed into their suitcases.

Marine biologists worry that if the trade is not stopped, numerous species of shark could become extinct over the next two decades. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that total world landings of sharks grew threefold from 272,000 tonnes in 1950 to 760,000 tonnes in 1996. Some other studies suggest that it may now be double that.

Sharks are important in oceanic ecosystems because they regulate the population density of smaller fish, but because they have much slower reproduction rates, they are far more susceptible to over-fishing.

Shark meat is of low value, prompting fishermen to employ a method called "finning", whereby a shark's fins are cut off and the finless but often still-alive fish is tossed back into the sea where, unable to swim, it dies.

Colombia maintains a tiny garrison on Malpelo, where rotating units of six marines live a Robinson Crusoe-type existence for month-long stints. But additional pressure to deter shark hunters has now been placed on the navy.

In July, Unesco declared the 857,150 hectare Malpelo fauna and flora sanctuary a World Heritage Site, because of its uniqueness as a breeding ground for hammerheads and other sharks, requiring better environmental policing.

In Buenaventura, where as many as 70 per cent of local residents depend directly and indirectly on the fishing industry, shark fin traders such as Mabel Santana are not impressed with the perceived "pro-shark" lobby.

"The government is trying to screw us over and the navy is trying to stop people from fishing, which is our livelihood," says Ms Santana, who buys fins for about 150,000 pesos ($65) a kilogramme and sells them for export to China.

But for the navy, the battle goes on. Andrés Patiño, a marine who is winding up his month-long stretch on Malpelo, insists that the hammerhead shark must be preserved in its habitat rather than served in a soup bowl. "I saw hundreds of sharks out there and they don't eat you when you swim, even without your boots on," says Private Patiño. "They're strange animals but very beautiful, and there is no good reason to eat them."