'More Lucrative Than Cocaine': Retailers Cashing in on Mexico's Endangered Totoaba Ernest Kao - South China Morning Post
go to original May 27, 2015

A totoaba is shown with Greenpeace program manager Gloria Chang Wan-ki at a Greenpeace press conference on Wednesday on the illegal trade in the endangered marine fish. (Bruce Yan)

More than a dozen seafood vendors in Hong Kong are openly selling the dried swim bladders of a critically endangered and protected species of fish, which are being smuggled into the city effortlessly from North America via legal channels, a Greenpeace investigation has found.

While the sale of fish bladder, also known as maw, is commonplace in Hong Kong, those from the totoaba, a marine fish indigenous to the Gulf of California in Mexico, are considered a highly prized delicacy, especially on the mainland, where they can fetch as much as HK$1 million ($128,883 US) per kilogram.

International trade in the totoaba is banned. And conservation group Greenpeace says poaching is also helping drive the extinction of another rare marine mammal, the vaquita, which is indigenous to the same area and has a tendency to get stuck in gillnets used to catch the totoaba.

A recent report published by an international Vaquita Recovery Team estimated there were fewer than 100 vaquitas alive in the wild. They are expected to be wiped out by 2018 unless drastic steps are taken immediately.

“The city has become a hub for illegal wildlife trade, with devastating results as far away as Mexico for the nearly extinct vaquita,” said Greenpeace’s East Asia programme manager Gloria Chang Wan-ki.

“If nothing is done now, they will … potentially follow the Yangtze River dolphin into oblivion and become the second species of whale, dolphin or porpoise driven to extinction in human history.”

Silvia Diaz Perez of Greenpeace Mexico said gangs in the north of the Latin American nation source the totoaba and sell them through middlemen in major cities on the west coast of the United States.

“If you look at the price of swim bladder, the smuggling of it would be even more lucrative than cocaine,” she said.

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