The season for juvenile European Eels has started but the EU has not decided what quantities can be legally exported. TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, warns that the European Eel faces a very bleak future unless levels of fishing are seriously reduced and trade levels adapted accordingly.
Last month the EU´s Scientific Review Group on Trade in Wild Fauna and Flora (SRG) expressed its deep concern about current levels of fishing and advised the EU to suspend all imports and exports of European Eels to enable eel populations to recover following a 90 percent decline in numbers of juvenile eels found in the region’s waters since the 1980s.
Stephanie von Meibom, TRAFFIC’s European Programme Co-ordinator, said that TRAFFIC urges the EU to heed the advice of its own scientific panel and suspend trade in European Eels until the SRG can determine that the impact of fishing for exports and imports are not threatening the status of the species as a whole.
The EU also turns deaf ear to the advice of the scientists as they said not to import Caspian Sea caviar because of the SRG’s concerns over how quota levels for fishing and export were set. European Eels are caught in several EU Member States for direct consumption, restocking, farming and export, with large quantities of wild juvenile eels or “glass eels” exported to Asia where they are reared in farms to commercial sizes.
Concern over the role of international trade in the decline of European Eel numbers in recent decades led to the species being listed in CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in 2007—following an EU proposal to do so.
