Late one August morning in 2018, an official at the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau at Navi Mumbai, received a few samples. At first glance, they looked like dried fish, cut in pieces of around one or two square inches in size. An exporter had moved a consignment to a warehouse at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust at Navi Mumbai, India’s largest container port.
The official regularly received random samples as part of his routine work. But while examining the samples, which had been declared as “dried cut pieces of stingray skin”, he had a feeling that something was wrong. “Over my years of work, I’ve developed an instinct,” the official said. “I felt that the exporter was attempting to conceal something.” So, along with his colleagues, he went to the port to inspect the consignment, which comprised 200 bags. They opened and emptied the contents of all 200 bags on the floor. There were some pieces of dried fish, similar to the samples. But among these pieces were other triangular, distinctly different pieces of dried fish, with a matte texture. “My instinct was right: these were shark fins,” the official recounted.
The exporter was in violation of Indian law – the Union government banned the export of fins of all sharks on February 6, 2015. “I advised the customs officials to confiscate the consignment,” the official said. The case was handed over to the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, or DRI, India’s premier law-enforcement agency to combat smuggling. They sprang into action, interrogating the exporter and investigating their trade network. Based on the information the agency obtained, it raided the godown of the exporter, Global Impex Trading Company, in Mumbai’s Sewri neighbourhood.
There, the agency confiscated 3,000 kg of dried shark fins. The DRI arrested Sharafat Ali, the proprietor of Global Impex, his brother Hameed Sultan, manager R Ahmed Asik and godown in-charge R Shivaraman. On questioning them, the agency received further information on the company’s operations in Veraval, a fishing harbour in Gujarat known for shark landings. On September 2, a team from the Gujarat branch of the DRI raided a godown in Veraval and confiscated another 5,000 kg of shark fins. Still, there was more to come.
During their investigation, the DRI found out that the exporter had dispatched a container with 4,000 kg of shark fins from Chennai, destined for Hong Kong. Following a request from Indian authorities, the container was offloaded in Malaysia and seized on September 4. In a matter of days, nearly 12,000 kg of shark fins were seized from just one exporter. It was the largest seizure of shark fins since the export ban in 2015. The seizure suggested that despite the ban, an illegal shark fin trade was thriving across India. Shark fin is one of the most expensive fish products in the world.
According to a 2015 report of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, the price of shark fins exported from India increased five-fold between 2000 and 2009, from below $20 per kg to $112 per kg. The price fell slightly by 2012, to $78.2 per kg.
The export ban has caused a further price drop, but the fin trade is still profitable. Kannan, a shark meat trader in Chennai (all names of those involved in the shark trade, as well as law enforcement officials, have been changed on request), confirmed that this was the case in his city. “Exporters sold one kg of dried shark fins at Rs 5,000” he said. “Now, the price has dropped. It’s often sold at Rs 3,000 a kg. They still make good money. That’s why they continue the illegal business despite risks.”…