Shark fin trading in Costa Rica

Prompted by WildAid’s campaigns, in East Asia, high profile politicians and their kin, film personalities, industrial establishments and committed individuals took voluntary “No shark fin” pledge.

In January 2011, British chef Gordon Ramsay spoke of how he and his TV crew were held at gunpoint and soaked with petrol when filming a documentary about the illegal trade in Costa Rica.

[4] In response to poor incomes and pressure, local fisherman are forced into harvesting shark fins, despite only getting about one dollar per pound on an average, less than a third of its total retail value.

[3] In May 2003, a young Costa Rican Coast Guard official, Manuel Silva, reported the landing of a Taiwanese fishing vessel with 30 tons of shark fins on board.

Not only were the Taiwanese vessels ignored by the four agencies charged with checking incoming cargos but the Costa Rican Fishing Institute (Incopesca) also failed to take action following his report.

[3] In 2006/2007, Canadian director Rob Stewart went to Costa Rica and the Galapagos to shoot what he thought would be an innocent documentary after sharklife underwater in the film Sharkwater.

[17] In 1998, China imported a reported 4,240 tonnes of shark fins worth US$24.7 million, but Costa Rica competed with Japan, Spain, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Norway, Ecuador, Peru and Fiji in providing for the Chinese market.

Hong Kong imports it from North and South American countries, particularly for use in either a cooked format or to prepare boiled soup, as a health fad, by mixing it with herbal supplements.

[21] Former Costa Rican president Abel Pacheco, a noted environmentalist, and his Taiwanese counterpart, Chen Shui-Bian began a crackdown on shark finning in the early 2000s.

[3] A reform bill has been proposed in Congress since the late 1990s in which a law would be passed entailing a prison term of up to two years for any perpetrator involved in the trafficking of fins that have been cut from sharks’ bodies before the catch has reached the dock.

Although the opposition to the trading is high and indeed illegal, effectively cracking down on the industry will be difficult as long as law enforcement and monitoring of fishing vessels is slack and corruption and poverty remain.

The Taiwanese and Indonesian mafia even run their own private docks in Puntarenas which are known to the government and the Costa Rican police but incoming vessels are rarely inspected in a climate of fear.

[3] As of 2003, no full-scale government investigation has been instituted into the port of Puntarenas, widely known to be the linch-pin of the illegal Costa Rican shark fin trading industry.