Organizations such as the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and the Species Survival Network (SSN) organized, administered and funded largely by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) have pledged to use COP 11 as the springboard to launch a global public relations campaign lamenting the plight of sharks.

Central to this effort will be a highly emotion-charged emphasis on "shark-finning," replete with graphic depictions of live sharks stripped of their fins and their maimed still-living bodies dumped back into the sea.

Preliminary aspects of this shark campaign have been aired in the world press with calls for national legislative action to ban the practice.

While such a "grotesque and wasteful practice" could and should naturally attract broad contempt by the public, press and politicians, its use by organizations such as EIA, HSUS, and SSN is quite misleading even to the extent that it tightropes the boundary between sensationalism and racial and cultural bigotry.

The inference in the NGO-orchestrated clamor against "shark finning" is fraught with suggestions that it is widespread among all shark species and that the main culprits are Asian fishermen and Asian nations where shark fin soup is consumed.

Such implied stereotyping flies in the face of the cultural heritage among Asian nations and cultures of maximum use of nutritional resources. Waste, particularly of the valuable meat, oil, structural cartilage, and leather from sharks is unheard of in the nations these NGOs malign by inference.

Incidences of "shark finning" have been reported. However, they are largely confined to incidental bycatch of the highly numerous blue sharks and appear to be confined to individuals who would violate any and all legal prohibitions against this or any other abhorrent practice.

When such actions occur, they certainly must be condemned. However, the deliberate and misleading manipulation of public, press and policy-making opinion by NGOs must also not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The extent of the NGO preparations for their planned "Shark Campaign" at COP 11 has been thorough, elaborate and expensive. EIA and its colleagues borrowed the model used in the global attempt to discredit shrimp aquaculture.

In the early 1980s, a loose affiliation of NGOs including Earth Island Institute rented space at the United Nations New York facility and invited representatives from shrimp growing nations to attend the first "Shrimp Tribunal." Again, perception not reality played a key role in this function.

By using the UN-facility at the meeting site, the Shrimp Tribunal cloaked itself in the appearance of (yet never stated) having some sort of United Nations approval. It didn’t. Nevertheless the location attracted attendees from various nations, and the event took on a patina of credibility used to bolster subsequent attacks on shrimp farming excerpted from NGO statements issued at the meeting.

Similarly, an "international conference" on sharks was convened in Honolulu, Hawaii from February 21-24 in anticipation of the CITES meetings. Ostensibly sponsored by the Barbara Delano Foundation and others, "Shark Conference 2000" brought respected shark experts from academia and various government fisheries agencies together to discuss issues affecting the status of sharks. It appeared very professional.

But the truth of the matter is that "Shark Conference 2000" was little more than a reprise of the "Shrimp Tribunal," again calculatedly orchestrated to manufacture credibility and provide a reference for "scientific papers" supporting the shark campaign engineered by controversial NGOs such as EIA for their narrow purposes.

The executive director of the Barbara Delano Foundation is Peter Knights, a former colleague and co-founder of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). Within the NGO community, the foundation under Knights’ direction primarily funds EIA related projects.

Faced with the anticipated media assault on shark fisheries and the cumulative financial resources of EIA, HSUS, the SSN and the Barbara Delano Foundation (estimated to represent more than US$200 million) CITES, fishing nations, and fisheries themselves can expect an uneasy time at COP 11 and for a long time after unless the misleading perceptions being conjured by the NGOs can be countered with persuasive reality in language easily understandable to a science-deficient public and press.