The scale of the illegal trade in European eel was brought to the attention of the UK’s wildlife crime community this week, as the Sustainable Eel Group’s Chairman, Andrew Kerr, addressed the annual Partnership for Action Against Wildlife Crime Conference. Held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the conference brought together representatives from law enforcement, central government, science, and conservation to examine some of the most persistent challenges facing wildlife protection in the UK and internationally. Kerr’s presentation, ‘Eel trafficking: the largest wildlife crime of a living creature on the planet and no one knows about it’, placed the European eel firmly within that discussion, drawing attention to an illegal trade that remains remarkably unfamiliar outside the fisheries, water, conservation, and enforcement communities working directly with the species.

Speakers at the conference included representatives from the National Wildlife Crime Unit, the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Defra, the Office for Environmental Protection and Kew, alongside organisations working across wildlife conservation, animal welfare and environmental law. The discussion ranged from scientific traceability techniques and the practical challenges of enforcement to public attitudes towards wildlife crime, institutional cooperation, and the need to build consensus around responses to wildlife crime. All of these questions are relevant to glass eel trafficking, both for the European eel and increasingly for other anguillid species exposed to related pressures. The trade presents a conservation problem involving migratory species, an enforcement problem extending across national borders, and a traceability problem within an international supply chain.

Bringing greater attention to that complexity has been an important part of SEG’s work on the illegal trade to date. Glass eels are small, highly valuable, and capable of being transported in extraordinarily large numbers, whilst the international controls governing European eel trade mean that trafficking can extend far beyond the waterways from which the animals originate. Addressing it consequently requires cooperation between fisheries authorities, local police officers, customs agencies, conservation organisations, and international enforcement networks, supported by effective traceability within the sustainable eel sector. The PAW Conference offered an opportunity to discuss eel trafficking within this much wider enforcement community, where experience of intelligence gathering, traceability, and tackling other forms of organised wildlife crime can help inform the response to the illegal eel trade.

For the Sustainable Eel Group, which primarily operates within the European Union, the opportunity to connect with policymakers in the United Kingdom was significant. European eels do not recognise the political boundaries created during their continental migration, and the networks involved in their illegal movement similarly operate across jurisdictions. The developing reset in UK-EU relations therefore provides a timely context in which to consider how cooperation on fisheries, trade and law enforcement can support closer coordination on eel trafficking. The UK and EU have already agreed a broader package intended to deepen cooperation, including new arrangements affecting fisheries and agri-food trade and stronger cooperation on serious organised crime and intelligence sharing. For a species managed and traded across European borders, SEG believes that maintaining effective channels between UK and European Union authorities will remain essential to identifying illegal movements, sharing intelligence, and preventing enforcement gaps from being exploited.

Kerr also used his address to emphasise that success in restricting illegal trade in A. anguilla cannot be considered in isolation from what happens to other freshwater eel species. SEG’s analysis has identified growing trade in non-CITES-listed anguillids, including the American eel A. rostrata from the Americas and other species originating in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, as international demand for juvenile eels continues. It has also identified Haiti and the Dominican Republic as important exporters of American glass eels and highlighted continuing gaps in monitoring, management and trade information. This creates a wider concern for SEG: where controls become more effective in one part of the global eel trade, demand can place greater pressure elsewhere, particularly where supply chains are less closely monitored or independently assessed. The lesson from SEG’s engagement at CITES last November has been the importance of looking across the Anguilla genus and across the complete supply chain; strengthening traceability and cooperation between source, transit, and destination countries, rather than allowing risk simply to move from one species or jurisdiction to another. Kerr told the conference that, whilst Proposal 35 failed to pass, the Resolution called for stronger international coordination, improved traceability, and closer cooperation between range states for European eel and other internationally traded anguillids. This, he said, needs to be addressed imminently and immediately in the context of a rapidly changing geopolitical climate.

SEG’s participation in the conference forms part of its continuing effort to ensure that illegal eel trafficking receives attention commensurate with its significance for the species. Enforcement against trafficking is one part of a much wider recovery effort that also encompasses habitat, migration, fisheries management, scientific monitoring and responsible trade, but its international and organised nature makes cooperation particularly important. Bringing the issue before the PAW community at Kew helped connect the experience of the eel sector with the wider wildlife crime agenda, whilst reinforcing a message that increasingly extends beyond the European eel itself. Effective action depends on understanding where trade is moving, where regulatory and monitoring gaps remain, and how authorities can work together to prevent exploitation from simply finding another route.