10. Elasmobranchs Consumption in Brazil: Impacts and Consequences

Commercial fisheries struggle to apply regulatory and legal mechanisms that depend on reliable species-specific data, and the shark industry faces an even greater obstacle to transparency with sellers changing product names to overcome consumer resistance. Fraudulent representation or mislabeling of fish, including sharks and rays, has been recorded in some countries. In Brazil, for instance, sharks are sold as “cação” – a popular name attributed for any shark or ray species; however, according to consumer’s knowledge of a large city of southern Brazil, more than 70% of them are often unaware that “cação” refers to sharks. Today, the Brazilian market has a high interest in encouraging people to eat “cação” meat, mainly because of their attractive prices. This raise a number of questions, mainly in respect to the knowledge of people/consumers, as what are they eating, and why the Brazilian meat market has grown so much in the last years.