$1,000 per pound

Christopher Serju, Star Writer

The advertisement of shark on the menu at a very popular seafood restaurant in Manchester recently has triggered a flood of questions about the source of the meat, which goes for $1,000 a pound, given that it is illegal to fish sharks in Jamaican waters.

"No, it is not legal in Jamaica but we know that people catch sharks, incidentally," André Kong, director of fisheries in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries told The Star last Thursday.

"I don't know if it is fresh shark or they might have imported it because we will not allow people to catch shark in Jamaica at all," the fisheries expert said.

Interestingly, under Jamaican law, it is illegal to export the meat or any part of this fish, but there is no constraint to importing shark.

"You are not supposed to harvest them but we know that there are incidental catches, and you have to be reasonable. What we don't want to have happening is for people to target sharks for the fin," Kong explained.

Across the globe, sharks are being murdered, their pectoral and dorsal fins slashed off - while the animal is still alive - to feed the growing demand for shark fin soup, though the fins offer virtually no flavour or nutritional value. Thrown back into the sea without their fins, the animals are unable to move effectively and sink to the ocean floor where they die of suffocation or are eaten by other predators.

Shark finning, as the procedure is known, has put the global shark population at risk of extinction, with estimates of the global value of the shark fin trade put at between US$540 million and US$1.2 billion in 2007.

The global shark catch in 2012 was estimated at 100 million.