WELLINGTON, New Zealand --- New Zealand is to ban shark finning in its waters within two years, Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy announced Sunday.
It is already illegal in New Zealand to slice the fin off a shark and throw it back alive, and Guy said the new ban would be extended to finning a shark and dumping the carcass at sea.
It will start to take effect in some areas next October and cover all New Zealand waters by 2016.
“The practise of finning sharks is inconsistent with New Zealand’s reputation as one of the best managed and conserved fisheries in the world,” he said.
Conservation Minister Nick Smith said New Zealand's attitude to sharks "has come a long way since the 'Jaws' days of the only good shark being a dead shark”.
“This ban on finning is an important step towards improving shark conservation,” he added.
New Zealand has 113 species of sharks of which seven are already protected including great whites, the whale shark and the basking shark.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, shark stocks are being decimated with about 100 million killed globally each year, mostly for their fins which are a sought after delicacy in Asia.
They are used in the lucrative shark fin soup market as well as in the production of many traditional medicines.
Meanwhile, Guinea led the world in shipping unreported catches of shark fins to Hong Kong, where the fish parts are sold for as much as US$700 a kilogramme , according to a report by conservation group, Oceana.
Hong Kong imported 49.7 metric tonnes of dried and frozen fins. which are used in shark fin soup, last year from the west African country, the report showed, citing revenue data from the Chinese territory. Mauritania with 28.4 tonnes and the Philippines with 24.5 tonnes were the second- and third-biggest shippers of unreported shark fins.
Hong Kong accounts for half of world demand for shark fins, according to Washington-based Pew Charitable Trusts.
Countries that participate in the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas are supposed to report catching sharks to the organisation, Angela Pauly, a Brussels-based spokeswoman for Oceana, said in an e-mailed response to questions. The commission is meeting in Cape Town this week to consider the first ever catch quotas for sharks, starting with the shortfin mako, the world’s fastest shark, as the killing of 100 million of the animals each year threatens the survival of some species.
The commission, which has 46 member countries as well as the European Union, is also discussing conservation measures for tuna and tuna-like species of fish in the Atlantic.
Under new rules, “if a country hasn’t submitted data on its catch of a species, it can’t catch and retain that species the following year,” Dave Bard, a spokesman for the environmental unit of Pew, a non-profit organisation. “This has been put into place largely due to poor reporting of shark catch by ICCAT parties, who often export shark fins but don’t submit the relevant data on that catch to the Commission.”
Shark fins range from thumb size to several feet, with that average probably less than a foot high and half that across.
The biggest legally reported exporters of sharkfins to Hong Kong in 2011 were Spain and and Singapore, according to Pew.
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