Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuela Saragossa.

Coming up, it ranks up there with caviar as one of the world's most costly foodstuffs.

It is an extraordinary flavour, isn't it?

Served with a fresh, chilled glass of sake. What could be finer?

Endangered European glass eels are ending up on Asian dinner plates and it's fueling a

multi-billion dollar illegal trade. People care about elephants and rhinos and pangolines,

which are African or Asian species, but here we have a European species that is really

under threat. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

This being the BBC, you can't do a program that refers to the natural world

without mentioning the legendary naturalist David Attenborough.

Our planet may be home to 30 million different kinds of animals and plants.

Each individual locked in its own lifelong fight for survival.

Everywhere you look on land or in the ocean, there are extraordinary examples of the lengths living things

go to to stay alive. But one species appears to be losing that battle to stay alive, the European

glass eel. Warnings of its demise come as the WWF reports that Earth is losing biodiversity

at a rate seen only during mass extinctions.

It's all down to exploding human consumption.

Marine freshwater species and are particularly at risks, the WWF says,

and one species that's particularly sensitive to this destructive whirlwind

of economic development and global trade is the European

glass eel. It's now on the UN's list of critically endangered species. Exports of glass eels

from the EU are banned, but illegal trafficking is rice, rife, I should say, with most of the

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