Shark Finning for Soup Is Nuts

Shark fin soup is an Asian delicacy that sells for as much as $200 a bowl. Yet the true cost of the dish is much greater if you figure in the damage that’s being done to the world’s shark populations.

Next week, an obscure, non-elected body called the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in Honolulu to decide whether to stop shark finning in the United States’ Pacific waters. Judging from the council’s past foot-dragging on the issue, it’s a good bet that it will come down on the side of doing nothing.

How do we get the fins that make shark fin soup? First, fishermen catch a shark by chance when they are fishing for other species. Then they stun or kill it, cut off its fins and dump the dead or dying carcass back into the water. This wasteful and barbaric practice is permitted for American fishermen in Central and Western Pacific waters. It results in the killing of more than 60,000 blue sharks per year, 85% of them caught alive and hauled aboard Hawaiian boats and all of them giving up their fins (and their lives) to make soup.

The management council, also known as Wespac, manages fisheries in the offshore waters surrounding Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and remote U.S. Pacific islands.

Wespac has been aware of the growing popularity of shark finning since the early 1990s but has failed to do anything about it. In the meantime, the number of blue sharks finned in those waters has increased from 2,300 in 1991 to more than 60,000 in 1998--a 2,500% jump.

So far, Wespac is balking at taking strong action against finning. The council’s reluctance to do the right thing has drawn criticism not just from environmentalists but from the National Marine Fisheries Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA recently wrote to Wespac that it “should take immediate action to ban the practice of shark finning.” Hawaiian state officials and native Hawaiians, who consider the shark an important cultural symbol, also have criticized Wespac. Last month, Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.) introduced a resolution calling for an end to finning.

In a recent commentary in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Wespac’s chairman defended its inaction on this issue on the basis that the blue shark species “is not overfished.” However, there isn’t enough information on the Pacific blue shark to know if it is overfished or not. Sharks have unique biological characteristics--slow growth, late sexual maturity and the production of few young--that make them vulnerable to overfishing; shark populations need a long time to rebuild. Sharks also play an important role in oceans as top predators, and their depletion can have wide-ranging effects on many other marine species.

If we wait until the species is overfished, it will be too late. After all, it was the lucrative fin market that caused some Atlantic shark fisheries to collapse in less than 10 years, a calamity from which recovery will take several decades. Who is to say the same won’t happen in the Pacific?

Wespac argues that the U.S. only contributes a small percentage of shark fins to the world market. Regardless of the amount, it is unacceptable for the U.S., under any circumstances, to continue to violate common standards of conservation and decency simply because other nations are contributing to the problem as well.

In fact, despite Wespac’s inaction, the U.S. has been a leading proponent of shark conservation and has called on the international community to consider a global ban on shark finning. Surely the U.S. can’t ask other nations to halt the practice if it permits it in its own waters?

Think the American people don’t care about saving sharks? Think again. In a 1996 poll by the environmental group SeaWeb on attitudes about the ocean, the one issue that bothered those polled the most was shark finning. No other human activity in the sea, including oil spills, elicited more anger.

Yet putting a stop to finning is about more than what’s popular; it is also about what’s legal. Wespac has a duty to end shark finning under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Act, the federal law that requires that “bycatch”--fish species caught incidentally by commercial fishing boats--as well as the killing of such fish if caught alive, be minimized.

If Wespac does not adopt a strong voluntary policy on finning this month, then the federal fisheries agency should stop the practice in central and western Pacific waters. Killing sharks for their fins is no different than killing rhinos for their horns, elephants for their ivory tusks or tigers for their penises. It is an indefensible practice that must end.