(MM-efe / 27-09-09)  The Republic of Palau has decided to create the first shark sanctuary in the world and has prohibited fishing this species in its waters. The president of this tiny Pacific nation, Johnson Toribiong, announced the ban during last Friday’s session of the UN General Assembly.

With half the world’s shark populations endangered, environmental associations have welcomed the initiative. It protects an area of about 661,600 square kilometers, an area the same size as France. Other nations like the Maldives Islands had taken steps to protect this species, although environmentalists say that the initiative of Palau leds the preservation to a “new level”.

Palau has recognized the importance that sharks have on the health of marine ecosystems, and has decided to do what no nation had done: declare its exclusive economic zone as a sanctuary for sharks. President Toribiong will appeal for a global ban on fishing sharks, whose fins are valuable merchandise on the world market. 100 million sharks are caught every year. At least 130 species of endangered sharks frequent the waters of this nation and it is hoped that this initiative will help to recover their populations.

Although this country has only 20,000 inhabitants, it covers an area of more than 200 islands, which means that its territorial waters are higher than those of most populous nations. In these waters, sharks are victims of the activity of large industrial fishing vessels and poachers from China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, avid consumers of their meat and especially of their fins in soup.

“They kill them for money. They only have commercial interests, but to save our sharks is by far more important than taking a soup,” the president Toribiong said. Palau stalk in particular to vessels engaged in fishing sharks to cut off their fins and return them to the sea, a practice widespread among eastern fishermen and reported ad nauseam by conservation groups.

The practice is so common that shark fin soup is no longer considered a culinary delicacy because of scarcity, but served at a low price in Chinese and Japanese restaurants worldwide.

The project is ambitious but its implementation will not be easy, local authorities recognize. The protected area includes the domains of special economic zone of Palau, which extends up to 320 km from the shores of the small archipelago, located 800 km east of the Philippines.

But tourism incomes have barely been able to fund the purchase of a patrol in a position to monitor an area the size of France. It is difficult to imagine how a single ship will be able to trace up to 70 fishing-legal or illegal fishing in territorial waters in Palau, as was recently observed from a reconnaissance aircraft of the Royal Australian Air Force.

“We will do what we can with the limited resources we have, but the goal is to draw attention to the killing of sharks for commercial purposes, and this happens not only here but in many other parts of the world,” warned the president of one of the World’s smallest countries, inhabited by just 20,000 people, a group of islands and atolls that lurks beneath its waters one of the largest concentrations of marine biodiversity across the globe.