Exposing Senegal as a gateway to the illegal shark fin trade

A cruel practice is going unseen and unpunished in the Atlantic Ocean. Threatened and vulnerable sharks are being captured, their fins sliced off, and their bodies thrown back to the sea to die. Instead of facing repercussions, the perpetrators profit.

In our new report and film, Cut & Run: Exposing Senegal as a gateway for the illegal shark fin trade, we have uncovered widespread evidence of illegal shark finning linked to distant-water tuna vessels that use the port of Dakar in Senegal. Serious failures in fisheries oversight have allowed illegally sourced seafood caught by these vessels to enter international markets.

After interviewing 124 fishers who worked on board Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned tuna longliners between 2020 and 2026, we found that the majority reported witnessing shark finning: the cruel, wasteful and illegal practice of slicing a shark's fins off and discarding the rest of its body at sea. Sharks are sometimes still alive when they are thrown back into the water, left to sink and slowly suffocate because they can no longer swim.

Our investigation traces these devastating accounts of shark finning back to dozens of vessels operating out of Dakar, one of Africa's busiest fishing ports and a major hub for distant-water fleets operating in the Atlantic.

Of those interviewed, 47 fishers who had worked across 24 vessels said shark fins were landed in Dakar, either directly or after being transferred at sea. Deliberate action was taken to conceal what was happening on board, including:

• Fins hidden away and evidence dumped before inspections.

• Catches unloaded under the cover of darkness.

• Mobile phones were confiscated from crew members to delete their photographs and videos.

The findings raise serious questions about the strength of port controls in Senegal. The country is a party to the Port State Measures Agreement, an international framework designed to stop illegally caught seafood from ever reaching global markets. Yet fishers consistently told us that the catches they landed faced little or no meaningful inspection.

Sharks are among the ocean's most threatened animals. An estimated 80 to 100 million are killed by fishing every year. Their disappearance puts the health of entire marine ecosystems at risk, and with it, the sustainability of the fisheries that millions of people depend on for food and their livelihoods.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, 70% of pelagic sharks are threatened with extinction. We uncovered that several threatened shark species were finned on board the vessels under investigation, including:

• Hammerhead sharks are listed on the IUCN's Red List as vulnerable or critically endangered.

• Bigeye threshers are listed as vulnerable.

• Oceanic whitetips are critically endangered.

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) explicitly prohibits its ‘active’ vessels from retaining all but one of these shark species, yet the photos and videos we collected from crew indicate that they are being captured.

The investigation also lays bare how far the seafood landed through Dakar travels. More than 1,800 tonnes of tuna and tuna-like products were exported directly from Senegal to Japan in 2024 alone. Processing companies in Thailand and Singapore have also imported tuna landed in Dakar before exporting the products to markets including the European Union, South Korea and the United States.

This raises serious concerns over the seafood being stocked on supermarket shelves and served in restaurants around the world. Consumers should take note: the seafood they are buying could be linked to vessels implicated in shark finning.

EJF is urging Senegal to strengthen inspections of high-risk vessels and adopt a mandatory "fins naturally attached" policy for all sharks landed in its ports, without the exceptions that create loopholes. We're also pushing ICCAT and the flag states of China and Taiwan to adopt the same rule and implement the transparency reforms set out in the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency.

Read the report in English and French, and watch the film here.