Lim is right, of course: chopping off a live shark’s fin would pose a challenge to even the most skilled sushi chef. But his assertion—that shark finning cannot happen because it would be nearly impossible to pull off—is false, since fishermen only fin sharks once the fish are no longer alive. By the time fishing vessels haul their catch on board, most of the sharks are dead, and if they’re not dead, the crew proceeds to kill them.
For something that’s worth a lot of money, shark fins don’t have the elaborate pricing system of other commodities, such as coffee or diamonds. Every time I press shark fin dealers about how they value their product, they’re fairly vague, and it’s not that they’re being deliberately evasive. Several dealers say they can’t be entirely sure where the fins they sell come from; Lim says when it comes to setting a price, it depends on “how big or small, that’s all,” along with the question of supply and demand. “Many times we don’t know where they come from. They can come from one country and be reexported to another country.” In the free-flowing Hong Kong market, the origins of any single batch of fins quickly become murky.
The shark fin trade remains an old-school business for the most part, with few of the modern practices that have come to define other commercial ventures in Hong Kong. All of the men I’m sitting with at this conference table have devoted their entire lives to dried seafood. Mak—the one they call “the godfather”—started work at seventeen and borrowed money from his relatives to operate his own stall, a stall he still runs today. These are men who survived the economic downturn that followed the 1997 handover to China, and they want to keep going until they retire.
Maybe that’s why Lim is so intense about defending the honor of what he calls “a 170-year-old industry. We are one of Hong Kong’s small businesses. We don’t want to spoil the name of Hong Kong.” He has little patience for my questions about the rules governing the auctions he runs—when I ask why a buyer has sixty days to hand over the money he’s bid on one of the shark fin lots, Lim replies, “I would have to ask about 170 years ago, why did you do this system? All this is a business game.”
Lim says fin traders have an overarching goal at this point: “We are trying to find somebody to save the shark.” While that seems improbable, given that their entire business is dependent on killing sharks, toward the end of our last conversation he points out that at the end of the day, the market for shark fins is a world market. “This is not the only place,” he tells me. “The whole world would have to think about this.”
——
Sarah Fowler is the kind of person who has to think about what Lim is saying. Co-chair of the Shark Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Fowler is—more than most scientists—responsible for gauging whether sharks are in trouble. Each year the IUCN Shark Specialist Group tallies up how shark populations are doing and assigns them to categories that describe their particular predicament (critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, and so on): right now, as many as one-third of all species are threatened with extinction. Like that of many international bureaucratic organizations, the Shark Specialist Group’s membership boasts a sprawling mix of personalities from a range of different backgrounds, and it takes tremendous diplomatic skills to keep it functioning. That is why, in part, Fowler invited Lim to join her organization a few years ago.
A number of factors prompted the move. It’s better to have your opponents inside the fold than outside, she reasons, and Lim and his colleagues can offer conservationists information they cannot obtain from anyone else.
“I don’t believe we can truly understand what the fisheries are until we understand what the trade is,” Fowler says. We’re sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Morro Bay, California, during a break in an annual meeting of some of the world’s most elite marine biologists, far away from the Hong Kong streets that we’ve both traversed in search of shark fin traders. When Lim and Giam told me that they had reached out to Fowler several years ago on the issue of shark finning, I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe them. But they were telling the truth, and Fowler sees their collaboration as a way of deciphering the often impenetrable world of fin trading. “We have a huge amount to learn, which they can teach us.”
Rather than shunning the Hong Kong traders, Fowler hopes to win them over with the argument that they, in the words of Lim, could be the “somebody to save the shark.”
“I do not believe it’s in their interest, any more than it’s in the interest of conservationists, to have their supply dry up,” she argues.
Fowler is trying to win fin traders over with a straightforward economic argument: if they scale back on fishing sharks, they could make shark’s fin soup into a rare treat, and guarantee their business will not die when they do. But while shark’s fin soup has symbolized wealth and influence for centuries, it appears to be on the verge of going down-market. According to a report by the conservation group WildAid, this legendary dish has become so commonplace that some Singapore restaurants offer all-you-can-eat shark fin buffets for $8.99, and Japanese stores are stocked with shark’s fin cookies, bread, and cat food. It’s become just another product, no different from the tiny cameras and sleek eyeglass frames that you can get for cut-rate prices at the stores lining Hong Kong’s Times Square. That means it now poses an even greater threat to sharks, since it will take an increasingly large supply to meet this demand.
“If it was my family business,” Fowler says drily, “I would be worried.”
Lim and his colleagues have devised a short-term plan to address their business concerns: press as hard as possible to expand the shark fin market in mainland China. The elegant coastal city of Shanghai—with its gleaming high-rise buildings, booming financial market, and sizable group of nouveau riche—has become a key target for what residents call yue cai, or Hong Kong food. In June 2010 Lim made a pilgrimage there to make his sales pitch to Shanghai’s Department of Wildlife Conservation officials and Xu Hongfa, who leads the TRAFFIC wildlife trade program based at WWF China. Touting the quality of Hong Kong’s dried seafood, Lim sketched out a vision of Shanghai as the next big shark fin market. And Lim has some reason to hope he can make inroads here, since the number of small shops selling fins have started to proliferate in Shanghai, even on the edges of the university campus where Xu Hongfa teaches. “Demand is high,” says Xu, who opposes the shark fin trade but adds the lack of international limits on shark fishing makes regulation nearly impossible in China.
Xing Ping, a seafood and dried goods market in Shanghai’s wealthy Xu Hui district, offers a glimpse into the city’s growing shark fin trade. Only a handful of shops explicitly display the product; for the most part potential buyers have to offer money first and describe what sort of fins they’d like to purchase before a shopkeeper will bring any out. But wedged in between offerings such as dried red pepper, black fungus, and an array of noodles, the shark fins are there, costing anywhere from the equivalent of $100 to $200 for half a kilo. Lin Mei Yu, whose family has run the market’s largest shark fin market since the start of the twenty-first century, is the rare exception, displaying more than a dozen bags of shark fins in her glass-paneled shop. All of her fins come from Hong Kong, and the vast majority of them are headed for the city’s hotels, where chefs will prepare them for their highest-paying customers. In Shanghai, the future of shark fin trading looks bright.
And this demand for shark fins, moreover, is actually fueling the demand for shark meat as far away as Africa. Mozambicans have not traditionally consumed sharks. But as they’ve begun finning off their southern coast over the past decade to satisfy Asian suppliers, a local business in shark meat has boomed. Alice Costa, marine program coordinator for the WWF Mozambique Country Office, says coastal residents in her country now see the flesh of everything from whale sharks to snaggletooth sharks as akin to beef. “Now the Mozambicans are changing their culture,” Costa explains. “They’re going for the shark meat instead of the fish.” It becomes a feedback loop,
where everyone along the supply chain is now invested in catching sharks.
But if Asian shark fin traders want a glimpse at the future, they might want to look at what has happened in the United States, where the demand for shark products has already peaked and crashed. Ironically, several Americans spent years trying to commodify an animal that was widely hated, only to see the entire business collapse.
It took years to convince Americans that sharks were worth anything at all. In 1928, O. W. Barrett, the agricultural director of the Department of Agriculture and Labor in San Juan, Puerto Rico, wrote a report titled “Shark Fishing in the West Indies.” Aimed at the U.S. audience, it detailed an array of potential uses for the sharks swimming within reach of America’s shores. Each product made from “that much hated denizen of the deep” had promise, Barrett argued. Sharkskin leather might hold the widest appeal—“Of beautiful leathers there is no end, but none better, it seems, than shagreen,” he wrote—but dried shark fillets “are a great boon to the housewife who never, even under the most favorable circumstances, likes the work of ‘dressing’ a fish herself.” Shark meat discards could serve as fertilizer, he enthused, while shark teeth had a place in the commercial market as well. “By the way, mounted on pieces of turtle shell, these shark teeth make excellent watch-fobs; their indescribable shape, brilliant white color, and serrate, curved edges make very attractive ornaments.” Barrett’s marketing plan had a hint of revenge as well, since his basic premise was that there was ample justification for killing them:
We have been hating sharks on general principles for centuries, and in some ways they have deserved it; but now it is high time that they should pay up. There are no more interesting animals in the world, and the ways and means of turning them into cash constitute one of the most fascinating of our modern industries.9
Shortly after Barrett wrote his shark-killing manifesto, shark medicinal products began to take off. In the 1930s and 1940s, merchants began selling shark-liver oil as both a lubricant and a source of vitamin A. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940, the United States could no longer get access to cod-liver oil. That led to a spike in shark fishing off the Pacific coast, where fishermen targeted soupfin sharks. The price of soupfins rocketed up from $40 to $1,500 per ton, and the Borden Company even started a shark division to obtain the vitamin A it needed for its milk.10 This fishing frenzy caused the soupfin shark population to collapse: only recently have scientists concluded the species has largely recovered. Manufacturers figured out a way to create a synthetic substitute for vitamin A, eliminating the need for shark-liver oil. Today merchants have found a different medicinal use for sharks: they use chondroitin, which comes from shark cartilage and usually takes a powdered form, to ease arthritis or help craft artificial skin for burn victims. But this market doesn’t reach quite the same scale as the vitamin A boomlet in the mid-twentieth century.
In one of the most recent marketing ploys, beauty companies have touted the benefits of using shark products to preserve women’s youthful appearance. In the summer of 2007 the Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group Oceana launched a public relations campaign aimed at halting the sale of shark squalene, an organic compound found in the animals’ livers. It’s an odd ingredient to be touting in the first place: squalene and squalane, a product derived from squalene, are found in high concentrations in the livers of deepwater sharks, which they use to regulate their buoyancy. Beauty companies advertise it as a natural, “oil-free” moisturizer that enhances everything from anti-aging creams to lip gloss.
Oceana’s chief scientist, Michael Hirshfield, and his colleagues discovered the marketing of squalene by accident. A consumer sent them an e-mail asking about the product after receiving a pitch from a doctor based in West Virginia. After doing some digging, they found out a company—ironically, named Oceana—was selling it as a skin enhancer in the Vermont Country Store, a venerable and quirky institution better known for selling inexpensive dresses for old ladies and socks aimed at mitigating athlete’s foot. The New England store was not alone: popular cosmetic brands such as Pond’s and Dove also use the compound for their products.
While Pond’s didn’t exactly shout about its shark-liver oil, the Vermont Country Store touted its $29.95 bottle of the company’s BioMarine Topical Deep Water Squalane with all the enthusiasm of 1950s admen. “Japanese women are admired the world around for their complexions as smooth as porcelain,” the copy read, juxtaposed with an image of a clear two-ounce bottle with a smiling blue shark atop it. “What’s their secret? 100 percent natural squalane, derived from the livers of deep-water sharks and used in some of the most elusive and effective beauty formulas for over 100 years. Because squalane also occurs naturally in humans, our skin can quickly and completely absorb this fragrance-free oil, making it extremely effective in reducing lines and moisturizing dry skin.”
Oceana—the environmental group, not the shark-peddling firm—is the sort of organization that specializes in launching public advocacy campaigns with a specific policy goal: in one of their most successful campaigns, they embarrassed several major cruise lines into treating their sewage rather than dumping it, untreated, into the open ocean. Their lobbying is aimed mainly at influencing the public’s perception of a given company: in the case of squalene, they wrote a series of open letters suggesting that major cosmetic companies should be ashamed of using the product. “Although companies are selling deep-sea shark products as ‘pure’ and ‘natural’ and ‘wild’—all great marketing words—what they’re doing is the same as peddling endangered rhinoceros horn or elephant ivory,” Hirshfield says, scoffing.
Within a matter of months, the companies backed down in the face of the activists’ campaign and jettisoned squalene. It wasn’t too hard a sell: botanical sources such as rice bran, wheat germ, amaranth seeds, and olives can also yield squalene, and the fact that deepwater sharks are considered among the most vulnerable sharks around made the practice particularly distasteful. By January 2008 the Vermont Country Store took BioMarine Topical Deep Water Squalane off its shelves, and Unilever, the London-based manufacturer that produces Pond’s and Dove, announced it would use a plant-based version of squalene instead. And exactly a year later Dr. Susan Lark, a major supplier of squalene-based cosmetic products, agreed to stop using the ingredient after receiving complaints from fifteen thousand members of the environmental group Oceana.
In this age of corporate responsibility, after all, some beauty manufacturers don’t want to be responsible for driving a species to the brink of extinction. “Unilever is committed to running its business on a sustainable basis and we have a policy of not using products from species that are either in danger or in decline,” wrote Gavin Neath, Unilever’s senior vice president for global corporate responsibility, to the executive director for Oceana Europe, Xavier Pastor, in a December 10, 2007, letter. “As such I can confirm we have identified, and started to take steps to remove from our products, any squalene with animal origins and will replace it with plant based versions (including the Pond’s brand that you mention in your letter).” That allowed Oceana—the ocean advocacy group—to declare victory.
The PR battle over squalene represents just the latest debate over claims that shark products can stave off aging and disease. For years, health-food stores have touted shark cartilage as a way to halt cancer, selling it in the form of powder-containing pills. The theory behind the product is that shark cartilage contains a substance that inhibits the growth of blood vessels—angiogenesis—that help tumors expand: if the vessels stop developing, so will the tumors. These products actually stem from what had been legitimate scientific research in the 1970s, when Judah Folkman, chief of surgery at Children’s Hospital Boston, conducted tests using animal cartilage to see if it had angiogenic properties. The initial research—on rabbits—was promising, and studies later conducted by a former student of Folkman’s and a new collaborator raised the possibility of inhibiting tumors by implanting shark cartilage pellets. While some
studies of angiogenesis continue to this day, scientists were unable to reproduce these results with humans, so credible researchers gave up on the idea of using shark cartilage to cure cancer.
Still, a biochemist named I. William Lane seized upon these findings and co-authored a book in 1992 titled Sharks Don’t Get Cancer: How Shark Cartilage Could Save Your Life. Lane got a major shot of publicity in 1993 from a segment by the newsmagazine 60 Minutes; in 1996 he received a patent to market shark cartilage pills and co-wrote a second book titled Sharks Still Don’t Get Cancer. Later, he founded a company called LaneLabs USA, headed by his son Andrew, and started selling a product called BeneFin that he claimed would help fight cancer.
In September 1997 the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to LaneLabs stating that BeneFin—along with two of the company’s other products that claimed to treat skin cancer and AIDS—violated the law because LaneLabs was marketing it as a drug rather than as a dietary supplement. When the company ignored the letter, FDA officials sued in 1999 to halt the sale of BeneFin and the two other products altogether.
It took five years, but on July 13, 2004, William G. Bassler, a federal judge in New Jersey, ruled the products amounted to unapproved new drugs. He issued a permanent injunction against their sale and ordered LaneLabs to pay restitution to anyone who purchased BeneFin and the two other supposed cures since September 22, 1999. The FDA’s acting commissioner at the time, Lester M. Crawford, welcomed the decision, saying it sent “a strong signal that the promotion and sale of unapproved drug products, especially for the treatment of cancer and other serious diseases, will not be tolerated.”
Since that legal decision, most of the American medical establishment has done its best to debunk shark cartilage treatments as a cancer cure-all. The National Cancer Institute reviewed the findings from the experiment trial Lane and his colleagues conducted in Cuba and called them “incomplete and unimpressive.” Gary Ostrander, a research dean at Johns Hopkins University, investigated the claim that sharks are immune to cancer by sifting through the National Cancer Institute’s Registry of Tumors in Lower Animals and found forty instances where sharks and their closest relatives, skates and rays, experienced benign and malignant tumors.11 Lane concedes this point in his second book, though he dismisses it as immaterial, writing, “While ALMOST No Sharks Get Cancer might have been a bit more accurate, it would have been a rotten title.”
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