The EC aims to prevent that practice through legislation that would force carrying the sharks with their fins half cut or on the body to the port.
Owners of Spanish longliners, consider this legislation unnecessary and that it is harmful to force fishermen to present the body in port with fins attached since, in order to sale it separately, they are forced to total or partial thawing.
If this measure was practiced, cold chain would break and the resource would lose quality.
The longline industry explained that it is convenient to store the bodies of sharks in the hold and the fins in another place; and that this European fishery does not discard bodies but markets them, so they are above suspicion to act against global ban on shark finning FIS.com reports.
For its part, the director general of the Spanish Fisheries Confederation (CEPESCA), Javier Garat, said surface longliners fish mainly swordfish and two shark species: blue shark (87 per cent of catches) and shortfin mako (10 per cent). Also, Spanish longline vessels account for only seven per cent of world catches of sharks.
CEPESCA is "committed to ban the cut of fresh fish and to compulsory land bodies and fins on the same port, allowing the finning in freezers to ensure traceability and correspondence of each body with its fins, and holding a catch statistical document", the group stated in a press release.
Anyway, this fleet "has an interest in finning to completely disappear outside the European Union (EU),” he added.
The elimination of finning and an improved management of shark fisheries "are the foundations on which the future of this fleet rests."
"To achieve both objectives the Spanish ship-owners will cooperate with the EC proposing alternatives to the tools raised by Brussels, which affect only the Spanish and Portuguese fleet. They have more than proven their good practice when fishing for sharks, and that it has no impact on the rest of the world fleet that captures about 90 per cent of sharks which are sold in the world in a year ", CEPESCA went on.
Regarding the market for swordfish and sharks, ship-owners warned that there is an alarming 30 per cent decline in home prices for their catch.
For example, last year every pound of swordfish moved from costing EUR 6 to EUR 4. And the bodies of sharks went down from an average value between EUR 1 and EUR 2 to EUR 0.60 per kg at present.
The longline fleet comprises 141 vessels and about 2,115 crew members.