December 16, 2022 — To save a fearsome predator from extinction, the United States is on the verge of putting in place a near total ban on buying and selling fins sliced off of sharks.
Late Thursday, the Senate approved language making it illegal, with few exceptions, to trade shark fins. The provision, which the House had inserted into an annual military policy bill, is now headed to President Biden for his signature.
U.S. lawmakers hope to put a dent into a worldwide shark trade that harvests between 26 million and 73 million sharks a year, according to one estimate. Fishers abroad often chop the fins from sharks while still alive and dump the bodies overboard.
But American shark fishers warn that banning fin sales here will result in fishers throwing away fins and do nothing to curb overfishing in foreign waters that are not as well regulated as U.S. fisheries. And some members of Asian communities, where shark fin soup is served at celebratory meals, have criticized past limits on shark fin sales as unfair.
“It’d be like telling a farmer to waste half of a chicken or half of a cow,” said Kevin Wark, a commercial fisher who catches shark and monkfish out of Barnegat Light, N.J. “It’s just not going to work out for us.
In fish markets, the fin is the most valuable part of a shark. The flat appendage is a main ingredient in shark fin soup, a delicacy in China and other countries where, for centuries, the brothy dish has traditionally been served at weddings and other big events.
U.S. fishers will still be able to catch sharks and sell the rest of their meat. After New Jersey put in place a statewide fin sales ban, Wark said he must cut off and throw away the fins to bring the rest of the shark to market.
The ban, he added, is a “poster child of people doing something to make themselves feel good and think that they’re going to save the species.”
“It just creates a system of waste,” he added.
When California moved forward with its own fin ban about a decade ago, it caused consternation among many Asian-Americans, even those that supported the prohibition.
“It’s not that this ban is ‘racist’ as some have put it, it’s that it’s the kind of thing that smells a bit of cynical political posturing,” cookbook editor and radio host Francis Lam wrote in a 2011 Salon article, which he said in a direct message on Twitter that he still stands by today.
Shaun Gehan, a lawyer who represents commercial fishers, said the industry has already been hit hard by a slump in sales after pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic limited access to Asian markets. The local ban, he added, does little to solve unsustainable fishing practices abroad.
“It certainly hurts a small, sustainable sector of the domestic fishing industry. But it’s also stupid,” Gehan said. “It does nothing to solve the problem where it actually occurs.”