Agenda
Brazil is the world's largest consumer and importer of shark meat. This trade raises serious environmental and public health concerns, given that shark populations are plummeting due to overfishing and that shark meat is high in heavy metal toxins like mercury and arsenic, to which young children are especially vulnerable. But because shark meat is sold in Brazil under the generic name “cação,” rather than as “tubarão,” the Portuguese word for shark, Brazilians eating it tend not to know what kind of fish it is.
A recent investigation by the environmental news site Mongabay uncovers the extent to which Brazilian government agencies are bulk-buying shark meat to serve in thousands of schools, prisons, hospitals and other public institutions across the country. By combing through public procurement records, the journalists built a database of around 1,000 shark meat purchases by government bodies across 10 of Brazil's 26 states, plus the Federal District of Brasília.
They also interviewed dozens of government officials, scientists, industry figures and ordinary Brazilians as they sought to understand the implications of the findings. Join Mongabay journalists Philip Jacobson and Karla Mendes for a discussion of the investigation, which was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
