Can EU Fisheries Minister Joe Borg save Sharks from...

This?

On Thursday, Joe Borg, the EU's Fisheries Commissioner, has pledged to tighten Shark fishing controls, due to the threats posed by the Shark Fin trade. This is good news because the EU has some of the worst Shark fishing regulations in the Western World.

Far be it for us to rewrite something when it is spoken plainly enough:

"Humans are now a far greater threat to sharks than they ever were to us," he told a news conference, adding that EU ministers would discuss the plan in April but no legal changes could probably be expected before 2010. "Sharks and their close cousins, skates and rays, are more vulnerable to overfishing than other fish because their reproductive cycles are so long. Once stocks have collapsed it may take many decades for them to recover," he said.

[Reuters]

In 2003, the EU imposed a fairly weak Shark finning regulation, but Joe Borg is considering tightening it by making it a crime to fin Sharks at sea. While this does not literally ban Shark finning, it makes large-scale finning less viable because fishing boats will have to haul dead Sharks whole to port and fin them in front of inspectors.

We will be watching you closely, Joe.

--Sharky

technorati tags: Sharks, Shark Finning, EU, Joe Borg, Shark Fin Soup, Shark Fishing

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