SANTIAGO, Chile - Countries seeking to protect the world's two largest fish species, the whale shark and the basking shark, suffered a setback today at a UN meeting in Chile.
The 160-nation UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species narrowly defeated two proposals to restrict trade in these sharks, threatenedby hunting for their meat and fins.
The tight vote, just two short of the required two-thirds majority in both cases, raised hopes among conservationists that CITES would hold a "second chance" ballot on sharks before the meeting ends on Friday.
"It is extremely disappointing that this important proposal failed, despite the overwhelming support of CITES parties," said Sarah Tyak of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
"The trade in basking shark fins desperately needs to be managed on an international level," she added.
The United Kingdom put forward the proposal on the basking shark while India and the Philippines sought to shield its bigger cousin, the whale shark.
Although the vote was a secret ballot, Japan and Norway have openly opposed the proposals to protect the sharks for fear they might lead to other restrictions on commercially valuable fish such as tuna.
The sharks are prized in Asian cuisines, especially for making shark fin soup, and hunting has depleted the populations by as much as 80 per cent in the past decade, conservationists say. People kill about 100 million sharks and rays a year, half of them in industrial fishing nets.
Smaller sharks are the target of the brutal practice of "finning" in which the fish are pulled in, their dorsal fins are sliced off and they are dumped back into the sea to slowly drown.
Basking sharks are particularly vulnerable to this deadly practice as they reproduce very slowly.
Contrary to popular belief, both the sharks considered by CITES are not voracious predators but gentle giants that feed on plankton as they cruise the ocean with their huge jaws open wide.
Whale sharks, the larger of the two, can grow up to 20m in length and can migrate as far as 20,000km at a time.
