30 Years of shark fishing in west africa - Shark Specialist Group

Salted and dried meat of shark on fishing zone of Kamsar in Guinea . (J. Dossa)
Shark fins on board of a vessel that had practiced finning in Cape Verde. (I. Ndiaye)
fish merchants (particularly, Senegalese),
who paid to have them exported to Senegal.
There were few wholesale fish merchants,
and sometimes the fishermen
exported the products to Senegal themselves.
The highly sought after shark fins only
represented on average about 5% of the
total weight of the Sharks (Ocean, 2010)
and the carcasses were transformed into
smoked, salted and dried, or fermented
and dried meat for the local market. The
dried meat was sold in Ghana, whereas the
smoked product was consumed in many of
the countries in the coastal area.
Locally, the wives of fishermen have
always played a very important role in
the salting and drying or fermenting and
drying (guedj) of the fish purchased or
received from their husbands. Still today,
the wives of Senegalese fishermen perform
this activity on ‘fishermen’s beach’ in
Nouakchott, Mauritania.
The European market
In Mauritania, at the beginning of the
1900s, fishermen using overnight nets to
catch smooth hounds (Mustelus mustelus),
the best known and most abundant sharks
in the northern Mauritanian waters, for
the Canary Islands market. In 1905, the
catches by schooners from the Canaries
were estimated to be between 7,000 and
9,500 tons of various species, including
meagre (Tous et al., 2002).
In Senegal, during World War II, the
extraction of liver oil from the deep-sea
gulper shark (Centrophorus granulosus)
justified the implementation of targeted
fishing. The traders involved in this activity
were French, and they exported their
products to Europe. The discovery of synthetic
vitamin A led them to abandon this
activity only a few years later.
In Senegal and Mauritania, the presence of
specific processing factories for Shark meat
using salting and drying techniques was
another factor that encouraged the targeting
of these species to be exported to Europe,
where the demand was high on the Spanish
market. On the Mauritanian and Senegalese
coasts, the Shark catch increased
at the end of the 1960s. Given how abundant
Sharks were in Mauritania, the fishing,
especially for blue sharks and oceanic
whitetip sharks, was carried out from the
beach using lines, and was adequate to satisfy
the factories’ requirements. These factories
belonged to Europeans, who exported
the products (fresh and salted and dried) to
Spain, France, and Japan.
Still in Mauritania, starting at the end of
the 1980s, some Portuguese traders made
contact with Imraguen fishermen in the
PNBA, thanks to wholesale fish merchants
in the zone, to buy fresh products to be
exported to the European market. At the
same time, a high demand was made for
fresh Shark by the factories set up in Senegal
to export to Spain, Holland, and Italy.
At this time, purse seiners also started targeting
Sharks.
Asian and international shark fin
markets
The Asian shark fin market has been the
driving force behind the Shark fishing
business in the past twenty years. According
to Mika Diop (Personal comment)
Hong Kong, Taiwan and, to a lesser extent,
Singapore and Japan are the final destinations
of virtually all the worldwide production
of Shark fins (95%).
The price of shark fins on the international
market rose from 1 US dollar/lb in the mid
1980s to 30 US dollars/lb in 1990 (Camhi,
1998). In Taiwan, the price for one kilogramme
of top grade shark fins was more
than 500 US dollars (WWF, 1996). This
explosion in demand is correlated to the
economic boom in the countries of South
East Asia, where shark fin soup is considered
to be an indicator of wealth at a
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