In restaurants or markets, you often can’t tell where the fish and meat on your plate came from. Fish, in particular, is often falsely labelled.
The environmental protection organisation WWF is warning against hidden shark meat when buying fish on a Mediterranean holiday. The predatory fish are found on the table in the EU surprisingly often – both illegally and legally. Globally, Europe even happens to be the biggest importer of sharks, with Spain, Italy, Portugal and France among the world’s top 10. But undeclared shark meat can also easily be hidden behind other types of fish, such as swordfish. “Shark illegally declared as swordfish often ends up on our plates. Yet shark populations in the Mediterranean are already drastically overfished. More than half of the species are endangered, a third even acutely so”, warns Simone Niedermüller, marine expert at WWF Austria.
In EU waters alone, 18 million sharks are killed annually. Worldwide the figure is 100 million. Moreover, species threatened with extinction are also caught without any restrictions.
Sharks are among the most endangered species in the sea: more than a third of the world’s 1,200 species are now threatened with extinction. The situation is particularly fraught in the Mediterranean, one of the most overfished waters in the world. According to the WWF, more than twice as much is caught there as is sustainable. According to the NGO, this has now made the Mediterranean the world’s most dangerous habitat for sharks.
