Eels have been a staple of European diets for millennia, from London’s jellied eels to Spanish angulas. But the world’s appetite is bringing them to the brink of extinction.
European rivers once teemed with eels; now numbers have collapsed due to overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Scarcity, combined with an insatiable demand for the grilled dish, has sent prices soaring and spawned a “thriving illegal trade”, said The Guardian.
Europol recently estimated that up to 100 tonnes of juvenile eels were smuggled from Europe each year, generating €2.5-3 billion (£2.19-2.63 billion) in peak years. That makes eel trafficking one of the world’s most lucrative wildlife crimes.
Eels have never been successfully bred in captivity at scale, so farms are “entirely dependent” on wild-caught juveniles to raise to maturity and sell for the table. European eels are “a high-value commodity” – especially in China and Japan, the world’s foremost eel consumers.
Trade in eels is a “highly complex, organised crime”, said investigative journalism platform Follow the Money, involving smuggling, document fraud, tax evasion and money laundering. Sophisticated criminal networks in Europe and Asia work “in tandem”.
However, there will soon be “an opportunity to reduce this illegal trade”, said Sheldon Jordan and Yves Goulet in The Globe and Mail. This month the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species will consider the EU’s proposal to enhance the protection of all eel species. At the moment only the European eel is listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, but they look so similar that officers “cannot reliably tell them apart” without costly DNA tests. Listing all eel species under it would “close the loopholes traffickers exploit”. | 
