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Wednesday, July 31,
2002
Conservation group renews campaign against shark fin soup By ALISA TANG BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - A wildlife group on Wednesday presented a new study to back its claim that shark fin soup in Thailand contains mercury poison, an allegation that provoked a dlrs 2.6 million lawsuit by sellers of the Chinese delicacy. The U.S.-based conservation group, WildAid, said it will submit the study conducted by a leading Thai laboratory to a Bangkok civil court as part of its defense in the lawsuit. "We told the truth when we said that sharks are in trouble and that the people eating them may be too,'' WildAid Thailand president Kraisak Choonhavan told reporters. He said the study by Chula Unisearch, a testing laboratory of Chulalongkorn University, indicated that one-third of the 45 randomly purchased shark fins in Bangkok had more mercury than designated as safe for humans by the Thai Food and Drug Administration. According to WildAid, sharks are predators at the top of the food chain, and so they end up as receptacles for toxic material that has been consumed by smaller fish that feed in polluted coastal waters. WildAid also claimed that shark populations around the world are in rapid decline due to overfishing and increased demand for shark fin soup, and that fishermen are often resorting to simply cutting off the fins of the animals instead of catching the whole shark. "We are not singling out shark fin dealers in Thailand. Thailand's shark fin trade is part of a global trade,'' said WildAid Thailand director Steven Galster. He said many of the fins sold in Thailand come from Hong Kong, which itself gets the product from sharks fished all over the world. "So the consumer of shark fin soup, whether they are in Bangkok or San Francisco, are adding to pressure on shark populations worldwide,'' he said. Shark fin soup is highly popular among Chinese populations and is a top draw at restaurants in Bangkok's Chinatown. A bowl of high-quality shark fin soup can cost as much as 4,000 baht (dlrs 100). - AP
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