‘The shark thrashes as it is dragged on to the beach or boat. Its fins are hacked off with a machete – the fishers don’t care if it’s dead or alive.’ So says Carlos Macuacua, shark conservationist and Mozambique’s first native dive instructor, as he describes the process of shark finning.
Shark-fin soup is considered a delicacy in China and other parts of East Asia, and with the sharp increase in prosperity in the region it is now being consumed in vast quantities. In Hong Kong, the world’s shark fin trading centre, a bowl of shark fin soup can sell for over $100. Unsurprisingly, shark finning is huge business, worth an estimated $500 million a year. Thanks in part to this appetite for shark fins, an estimated 73 million sharks are slaughtered every year, with 110 species now on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s ‘Red List’ and facing extinction.
