Meat on the menu and fins for export: Latin America’s shark trade with Asia

Different regions play an active role in the global shark trade; supplying the Asian markets with shark fins, receiving shark meat for domestic consumption or making profit through internationally operating fishing fleets and/or facilitating the transit of shark products for re-export. Prior to CoP19 in 2022, Bloom Association in collaboration with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) undertook an extensive analysis of official raw customs data of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (referred to as Hong Kong SAR hereafter), Singapore and Taiwan province, China (referred to as Taiwan province hereafter) and published the findings in the report Supply and Demand: The EU’s role in the global shark trade, in March 2022, demonstrating that the EU is one of the top sources of shark fin products for these Asian markets.

The current report follows in the series of trade analyses of raw customs data of Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, and Taiwan province from 2003-2020, this time mapping out the role of Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries, with the aim of helping governments in the region to understand, monitor and regulate their shark-related trade. Several of the recommendations focus on improving transparency and traceability of the traded products. Given the global scale of the shark-related trade, and the multiplicity of trading partners, countries trading in the products will need to proactively work together to share trade data, standardise trade reporting formats and greatly improve the quality of the trade data collected. Such steps are required to bring the level of data transparency and traceability to where it needs to be for a trade as complex and potentially detrimental as the shark trade.

Executive summary is available here in English and Spanish.

The full report is also available here in Spanish.