The Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act

 A Fisherman’s Farce

If you think that the shark fin trade is confined to Asia and a few dingy warehouses along the coast that are “somewhere else,” the fact is that all of the shark fisheries in the United States of America are part of the deadly trade. With The Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act, shark fishermen are pushing hard to make sure that they will continue to be able to profit from it and disseminating a large amount of propaganda about it that does not reflect the true facts.

They claim that they fish sharks sustainably, so should not have to give up their lucrative profits. But the fact is that sustainable shark fishing is nothing but a fishermen’s farce.

If history has taught us anything, it is that no animals can stand up to sustained, targeted, commercial killing—not whales, not turtles, not fish, and not sharks.

Sharks have become so valuable due to the rising demand for their fins that intensive shark fishing spans all oceans and it is associated with much illegal activity, including murder. No record is kept of most shark kills, so the idea that the entire shark fin trade is going to be made sustainable, under the guidance of the USA, is ridiculous. In fact just the documented shark fin trade, which is a tiny fraction of the true numbers, proves that shark Fisheries have underestimated the numbers of sharks killed by at least 400%.

It is the Sustainable Shark Alliance (SSA), which represents shark fishermen, dealers, and processors, and those who advocate their views (shark fisheries scientists, lawyers, and lobbyists), who promote H.R. 788, The Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act of 2019. They actually admit that without the profit from shark fins, shark fisheries in the USA will be shut down. The only profitable part of the shark is its fins. (However, all shark fishermen in countries where sharks were protected, had to give up the profit from the fins.)

They reason that American shark fishermen fish sustainably, so they should be able to sell their shark fins on the lucrative shark fin market. They promote the idea that if only shark fins from sustainable fisheries are used for shark fin soup, this will put an end to shark finning worldwide, and those countries who continue to practice it will suffer.

However the numbers reveal that the large market for shark fins in the USA could never be filled by fins from sustainable shark fisheries, for only a few of them may temporarily exist.

The USA is the seventh largest shark fishing nation in the world. It imports several hundred tons of shark fins annually and this amount is rising yearly, in spite of bans in such major centers as California and New York. Scientific studies have shown that the alleged markets for shark meat have resulted from the fins attached policies. The fins are taken and a vast surplus of toxic shark meat is thrust on the market. As a result it is being used in everything including make-up and dogfood.

Sharks are so valuable that they are always killed for the money for their fins--such profits rival those of the drug trade.

Fisheries advocates claim that:
  • If the shark fin trade is banned, more sharks will be killed, because fishermen will have to catch more sharks to make the same amount of money.
  • The fins should be used because of the general principle that the whole shark should be used.
  • Sharks are really being killed for meat, not for their fins.
  • If American fishermen don’t kill the sharks and supply the shark fin trade, “bad actors” will kill them.
But these arguments are not based on science, facts, or logic, and rely on political bias and rhetoric. While it sounds like a good idea to import, export, and sell products that only come from ‘sustainable’ fisheries, The Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act of 2019 is completely unrealistic to put into practice.

Fisheries governance regimes are very expensive to set up and operate, and the cost varies depending on the type of measures implemented, ranging from scientific advice and management to monitoring, control, surveillance, and enforcement. Every country in the world with a shark fishery would need to be lobbied to pass sustainable shark fisheries management legislation. When laws are in place and enough data has been collected to determine what the sustainable catch rates might be for each species caught in every shark fishery, development and funding of management plans would need to be put in place, including staffing, training, purchase of equipment, and so on. Then, enforcement plans would need to be developed, implemented, and funded.

The problems of who would set the standard, who would lobby other countries to accept the USA’s evaluation of what is sustainable, who would monitor the program, research, and pay for it, are all unaddressed. Whether the American public would be willing to finance it through their tax dollars has not been mentioned.

These costs tend to fall on the public sector while the benefits are enjoyed by fishermen.

All that is involved in the Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act—putting American practices into play on a global scale—would need to be maintained long-term, while somehow requiring every country to keep politics, financial self-interest, and corruption, to say nothing of criminality, out of the process.

There is no international body that can force sovereign countries to do anything on this scale. Some countries, especially those with large fisheries, have consistently been resistant to controls on fishing based on scientific data.

Europol reported in 2018 that illegal fishing of tuna was twice that of legal fishing in the Atlantic. If it is not possible to effectively manage a species for which there is probably more data than any other, the idea that the USA will create sustainably managed fisheries for all 500 shark species (and all fish species) throughout the entire world is absurd.

Further, World Trade Organization agreements require that no country can favour the imports of one nation over another, nor ban imports of a product while still locally producing and exporting the product. The Sustainable Shark Fisheries and Trade Act would appear to be in direct violation of those agreements, and Fisheries advocates have not stated how the USA will get around this.

A World Bank study, Sunken Billions 2009, and Sunken Billions Revisited, 2017, has found that unsustainable Fisheries management practices have led to globally depleted fish stocks that produce $83 billion less in annual net benefits than would otherwise be the case. Ninety percent of fisheries are over-exploited. To address this global crisis, the main requirement is that fishing effort is diminished, while at the same time, fish stocks must be rebuilt, and coastal ecosystems returned to a state of health.

This study specifies that little is known about the actual carrying capacity of most fish stocks that are subject to commercial exploitation, and that Fisheries’ data are often highly uncertain.

Sunken Billions predicts that social unrest will result from the necessary reduction of fishing effort that must come, because some fishermen will have to turn to other occupations. So the current outcry from the shark fishing industry has been predicted, and is understandable, but indefensible. 

The World Bank recommends that the fishing subsidies that have facilitated over-fishing in the past, be used to ease this social transition.

(c) Ila France Porcher, 2019

See also:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Letter to the Discovery Network

Image
To the Discovery Network: Members of our Internet shark discussion forum, SHARK-L, have been asked by your marketing representatives to help promote your famous Shark Week sequence. This letter, signed by list members and friends, is our formal response to the request from your grass roots agency, New Media Strategies, for our support of the programming. How can we support Discovery Channel when we are fighting for shark conservation, and its biggest obstacle is the monster image given to sharks by the media, including Shark Week programs? Further, some of us who have been directly involved in the production of your documentaries feel disgusted at the way that our interviews were censored and our words twisted around. Our group is comprised of scientists, researchers, educators, media companies, and many NGO's, lobbyists and others. In aggregate we represent a strong network of influence that can help or hurt the efforts of any Shark related programming or initiatives. In...
Read more

On the gestation period of the blackfin reef shark, Carcharhinus melanopterus in waters off Moorea, French Polynesia

Image
Originally published in the Journal "Marine Biology" at: http://link.springer.de   Abstract Underwater visual and photographic observations, over a four year period, monitored the presence of mating wounds on female Carcharhinus melanopterus . Mating begins in November and continues until the end of March as each female follows her own temporal cycle. Correspondingly, parturition begins in September and continues until January. Each female again mates 1.5 to 2.5 months after parturition, thus completing an annual reproductive cycle. The gestation period is 286 to 305 days, with slight individual differences. All resident sharks under observation followed this pattern. Evidence of reproductive events presented by transient females conformed with the pattern of the residents. Introduction The few studies postulating a gestation period for the reef blackfin shark Carcharhinus melanopterus have varied greatly in their conclusions. Based on an examin...
Read more

SHARKS DON'T BITE like we do

Image
Though sharks have gained a mythical reputation for being biters, their behaviour in nature is the opposite of what we would expect from the vicious animals depicted in the media. I had many opportunities to observe sharks under circumstances in which I expected them to bite, as a dog, cat, horse, or bird would tend to do. Yet they did not.  All other species, wild and tame, with whom I had the intimacy I shared with sharks, had bitten me sooner or later, either by accident or in a fit of pique; even my pet dog sometimes grabs my hand in her teeth along with the offered cookie.  Further, while the blackfin reef sharks I knew enjoyed roaming with favourite companions, I never saw them fighting with each other. They had friends but no enemies ! For years people had told me, and I half believed myself, that one evening I would be bitten and would bleed to death, or faint and drown. Since I was alone far from shore as night was falling, I could expect no one to...
Read more