- The Dominican Republic withdrew a proposal to regulate commercial trade of its American eels under CITES, an international wildlife trade treaty. Its decision came on the heels of a failed effort to end unsustainable trade in all freshwater eels at the November meeting of delegates from 184 nations and the European Union in Uzbekistan.
- Freshwater eels are in high demand as a culinary delicacy in East Asian cuisine, and juveniles are bought and sold both legally and on the black market for aquaculture. But illegal trade has soared in recent years.
- With unrelenting demand, European eels are now critically endangered. Their cousins, the American and Japanese eels, are endangered, with their numbers plummeting.
- Conservationists say the Dominican Republic’s failure to enact protections that would monitor trade is disappointing and further threatens the future of an imperiled species.
Slimy, snake-shaped and yellow-brown, freshwater eels swim the rivers, estuaries and the coastal waters of Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa and North America. Despite what their name says, these fish have strong ties to the oceans: They spawn at sea and the babies drift to their freshwater habitats, piggybacking on ocean currents.
Though there are 19 known species, more than 99% of eels eaten worldwide belong to three species: the European eel (Anguilla anguilla), American eel (Anguilla rostrata) and Japanese eel (Anguilla japonica). They are coveted as delicacies in East Asia, primarily in Japanese, Korean and Chinese cuisines, where they are consumed once they grow to at least 30 centimeters (1 foot) long. In Japan, where it’s known as unagi, the fish is eaten grilled or smoked, as sushi or with rice.
Most of the global harvest, however, is for finger-sized, transparent baby eels, also called glass eels or elvers. They’re caught the world over and shipped to aquaculture facilities, primarily in China, where they are reared for a year or two before being sold as food. With unrelenting demand, all three eel species have perilous conservation status, teetering on the brink of extinction. The European eel is critically endangered; the other two are endangered.
In the last three months, two back-to-back efforts to protect these disappearing species failed. At the November CITES meeting of 184 countries and the European Union, delegates rejected a proposal to regulate international commercial trade in all freshwater eels. Another proposal by the Dominican Republic to monitor transnational commerce of American eels was withdrawn in January. The imperiled fish continues to be caught both legally and illegally. They are a very profitable product.
“It’s so lucrative that the legal fishery can’t meet demand,” said Sheldon Jordan, an environmental enforcement specialist with the UK-based nonprofit the Sustainable Eel Group. That’s opened up avenues for illegal trade that’s worth at least $3.4 billion a year, making it more profitable than smuggling drugs or guns. Glass eels are dubbed the ‘hottest black-market item’ in the U.S.: A 19-liter (5-gallon) bucket of these fish was valued at $50,000 in 2020. Prices hit an all-time high of $15,000 per kilogram ($6,804 per pound) in Japan in 2024.
In the last five years, sky-high black market prices for baby eels have even drawn armed gangs in Haiti to join the booming illegal trade in the Caribbean.
A long battle to protect eels from trade
Over the last two decades, there have been attempts both to regulate the legal glass eel trade and to stop smuggling. In 2009, trade in European eels — whose numbers have nosedived by a whopping 98% since 1980 — was regulated under CITES, the international wildlife trade treaty. A year later, the EU banned all commerce in these fish outside its borders. Still, declines continued, and traders targeted new grounds: first, North Africa for European eels and then North America and the Caribbean for American eels.
In October 2025, the Dominican Republic, a hotspot of the illegal trade in the Caribbean, submitted a request to add American eels to CITES Appendix III, seeking cooperation of other countries to prevent eels from being trafficked from the country.
A country can unilaterally add any of its protected species to Appendix III at any time. Unlike Appendix I, which prohibits all international trade, and Appendix II, which allows regulated commerce with permits, Appendix III controls the trade of species originating from a single country. The Dominican Republic listing would have helped monitor the trade there, said Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “It wouldn’t have prevented illegal or unsustainable trade.”
At the CITES meeting in November, the EU and Panama proposed regulating all international trade in freshwater eels, requiring export and import permits. Honduras was initially a co-sponsor, but backed out.
The Dominican Republic’s Appendix III request was “a good thing,” Jordan said, because it could have put some pressure on other countries to approve the EU-Panama’s proposal. But countries overwhelmingly voted to reject it at the CITES meeting: 100 opposed the proposal, 35 supported it and eight abstained. A proposal to add a species to Appendix I and II needs a two-thirds majority to pass. When the final votes were displayed on the screens, the room erupted with loud cheers and applause.
Speaking on the floor just before the vote, the Japanese delegation strongly opposed the proposal on the grounds that its science was inaccurate. Japanese eel populations were stable, they argued, despite data indicating otherwise. Delegates also mentioned that DNA kits are available to prevent “laundering” of European eels among legally traded species. To an untrained eye, they all look identical in their juvenile form and as smoked meat. But such kits, currently used in South Korea and Canada, cost about $30-$50 and may not be affordable for many countries, Jordan said.
Zimbabwe, speaking on behalf of all African countries at the meeting, as well as India, China, Korea and Canada, objected to stronger trade protections for all freshwater eels. The U.S. also opposed the proposal, citing its own regulations, along with the Dominican Republic’s Appendix III listing, arguing that these were sufficient to ensure sustainable trade of American eels.
Lieberman called these reasons “erroneous” and “an excuse” to not protect an imperiled species. “The U.S. knows that Appendix III is not a substitute for Appendix II,” she said.
After the defeat of broader protections for eels, conservationists pinned their hopes on the Dominican Republic’s request. But in January 2026, the country withdrew its proposal just two days before it was set to go into effect.
“I’ve never seen an Appendix III listing being withdrawn like that so quickly,” Lieberman, who has been a delegate at CITES meetings for more than three decades, said. “Am I shocked? No, it takes more than that. Is it disappointing? Yes.”
Lobbying efforts at CITES
Both Jordan and Lieberman told Mongabay that massive persuasion efforts from Japan and the aquaculture industry scuttled both efforts to protect eels.
“Countries voted against the proposal because they had instructions,” Lieberman said, referring to private conversations she said she had with several government’s delegates. They allegedly told her of high-level consultations with Japanese ambassadors in their respective countries, who met with them in the months leading up to the CITES gathering and lobbied to reject trade restrictions on eels.
CITES meetings, where proposals can pass with a majority vote, are no strangers to these efforts, and Japan has exerted heavy influence in the past. In 2010, when Monaco proposed banning the international commercial trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), the country pushed heavily against it, just as it had on another vote to protect tuna in 1992.
“Japan typically has a more utilitarian approach in their philosophy towards CITES,” Jordan said. With big profits at stake for the eel industry, he believes the Dominican Republic’s decision may have been influenced by countries supporting the aquaculture industry. “If you’re going to put international trade regulations on a very, very lucrative product, and nobody else is — and the world just voted quite decisively not to put controls in — where is the value for you in continuing to do that, except out of virtue?” he said.
The Dominican Republic’s CITES representatives did not respond to Mongabay’s questions on why they reversed their decision.
Without trade protections, eels at risk
The demand for baby eels continues to grow, and with it, illegal harvest, as exports in some countries surpass permitted quotas. In 2022, Canada’s glass eel exports were four times the legal catch, and a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of live glass eels fetched around 5,000 CAD ($3,690) on legal markets.
Now, conservationists fear a “free-for-all” situation for most of the world’s eels, which can be caught and sold without restrictions.
“Those who are engaged in illegal trade can celebrate because there’s no regulation now of eels other than the European eel,” Lieberman said, referring to the international trade. “If it goes extinct in 10 years, what do they care? They made their money. They’re not into conservation.”
Jordan said the discussions about eels could have an additional negative consequence. “This listing proposal might have actually raised awareness in a number of the small countries of the Caribbean and South and Central America that they have a valuable resource that isn’t being exploited,” he said, adding that the demand for eels is so high that legal trade can’t fulfil it.
While countries agreed to collaborate and share management data on all freshwater eels — despite not all of them being listed on CITES — these fish remain vulnerable to widespread trafficking.
“I think it is really, really, really important now for the range states, particularly in the Caribbean and North America, to get together and work on joint management of this species,” Jordan said.
Eels’ future in troubled waters
As trade decimates freshwater eels, their ability to bounce back is challenged by the species’ biology and the threats they face. All American and European eels are born in the deep waters of the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, and hence come from a single, shared stock. Females mature very late — at about 20 years of age — and spawn only once in their entire life.
A female lays anywhere between 2 million and 20 million eggs before she dies, and about 40% of the young survive until adulthood. In addition to the massive trade, pollution, habitat loss and dam construction also threaten their survival.
For a long-living, slow-reproducing species like eels, removing tons of juveniles, either legally or illegally, means there will not be enough adults in the future to spawn, and their population can’t recover quickly from steep declines.
“What my fear is, is that a lot of the glass eel fishery that’s happening now in North America or the Caribbean is the offspring of eels that spawned 15-20 years ago,” Jordan said. “Given that the life cycle of the eel is between 10 and 25 years, it would only make sense that we would start to see the impacts with the next generation.”
CITES delegates from around the world won’t gather again until 2028. In the meantime, Lieberman said, other countries, including the Netherlands and France that have territories in the Caribbean should add American eels to CITES Appendix III. She also noted that the EU should work with countries with native freshwater eel populations to garner support for its future proposal.
“Hopefully, the EU, which really is worried about the European eel … will have a better strategy going forward in the next couple of years.”
Banner image: Glass eels from Nova Scotia, Canada. The country is the largest exporter of American glass eels. Image by Hunter Stevens via iNaturalist.
Spoorthy Raman is a staff writer at Mongabay, covering all things wild with a special focus on lesser-known wildlife, the wildlife trade, and environmental crime.
Glass eel smuggling booms despite bans, leaving species on the brink
Citations:
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Nijman, V. (2017). North Africa as a source for European eel following the 2010 EU CITES eel trade ban. Marine Policy, 85, 133–137. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2017.06.036
Choo, J. S. Y., Rabbani, G., Lim, E. X. Y., & Wainwright, B. J. (2025). A shift in the trade? An investigation of the eel trade reveals a likely species switch. Conservation Science and Practice, 7(4). doi:10.1111/csp2.70013
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