Shark finning, surely one of mankind’s most appalling oceangoing legacies, has been vigorously protested and fought by conservationists for years. Editor Chad Merchant discovers that some welcome and much-needed progress is finally being seen.

It’s hard sometimes to get your head around really big numbers. We throw them around with impunity, but sometimes fail to grasp their true immensity. Consider the number 100 million. It’s more than three times the population of Malaysia, but even that doesn’t quite drive it home. I think you’d have to actually see a giant crowd of 100 million human beings to seriously appreciate just how many people that number really represents.

Appallingly, 100 million is the number of sharks estimated slaughtered annually, over 70% of them just for their fins. It’s a barbaric business, finning: sharks are hauled up alive from the water only to have their fins sawed and hacked off. The sharks are then thrown back into the ocean, bleeding, unable to swim, mortally wounded, left to die a slow, terrible death, either by drowning or by falling prey to other oceangoing predators. If this happened to a few sharks, it would be disturbing. But when it’s happening to tens of millions of sharks on an annual basis, it becomes an outrage. Not just because it’s a savage, cruel practice… and not just because it’s done to satisfy the demand for a bland, gelatinous soup with no health benefits (and possible health risks). Finning is a major problem because sharks are a crucial apex predator in the ocean, and by decimating the world’s shark population, we are in fact causing ecological damage far beyond the obvious harm suffered by the sharks themselves. Without sharks to hunt second tier predators, the delicate “food chain” collapses and entire oceanic ecosystems can become imbalanced, leading to the decline of fish stocks and even of coral reefs.

How bad is the carnage? In some areas, shark populations have dropped by up to 98% over the last 15 years. A quarter of the world’s shark species are now facing extinction, and the shark fin market is named as a primary cause. This is especially sobering in light of our previously considered number, 100 million, as that’s also the astounding number of years modern sharks have existed and thrived in Earth’s oceans. Until now.

A newly emerging and affluent middle class in China drove the demand for shark fin soup sky-high throughout the 1990s and into the new century. Not so long ago, shark fin soup was a rare luxury, served only to the elite or at the most auspicious of occasions. But as household wealth rose, the formerly unattainable soup became little more than a middle-class status symbol. During the height of the shark slaughter, shark fins sold for over US$700 a kilo, more than enough money to encourage fishermen to target sharks worldwide in the waters of more than 100 countries.

But over the last couple of years, there have finally been some positive developments. Regional bans, coupled with pressure from conservationists, have done some good. A number of large hotel chains have enacted policies against serving shark fin soup, and nearly two dozen airlines have refused to transport shark fins. An austerity campaign in China, along with a crackdown on corruption in that country’s government, has seen the soup disappear from the menus of official functions. But for the wholesale slaughter of sharks to really be impacted, conservationists wisely realized early on, demand had to be quelled, so that’s exactly what they set out to do. And reports suggest it’s working.

WildAid, a US-based conservation organization focusing on reducing the demand for wildlife products, has collected data showing some encouraging trends. The report complied data from a number of different sources including news reports, online surveys, undercover interviews with traders in China, and trade statistics from Hong Kong, regarded as the global hub for trade in shark fin, handling about 80% of the world’s trade – over 10,000 tonnes of shark fins in one year alone. But perhaps that is changing: WildAid’s report shows that sales of shark fin have fallen some 50 to 70%. In Guangzhou alone, considered the centre of the shark fin trade in mainland China, sales have dropped 82%. Wholesale shark fin traders there are complaining that sales are drying up and that prices for shark fin are falling.

The WildAid report says that a shift in public attitude towards the consumption of shark fin in China, particularly among younger generations, is having a real impact. According to the report, a whopping 85% of Chinese consumers surveyed online said they had given up shark fin soup within the past three years. Many credit a large awareness campaign educating them on the impact of the shark fin trade, headed by former basketball star Yao Ming. Indeed, bans and sanctions weren’t really making a meaningful dent in the numbers of sharks being slaughtered. It took reducing demand.

This is one of those things Westerners cannot forcibly change, nor something over which expats have much influence. They can act as catalysts, though, and help foment the change “through the back door,” encouraging the social evolution in the societies that drive this shameful industry. And that’s exactly what has happened. Asia is at last waking up to the scourge of shark finning, and it is hoped that this abhorrent practice – and not the sharks of the world’s living oceans – will soon go extinct. One Guangzhou trader recently lamented, “Shark fin is a dying business.” Let us hope.

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Source: The Expat magazine June 2015
Photo credit: WIlly Volk / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA