Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  U.S. authorities followed with shark protections of their own, and on December 21, 2000—just a month before leaving office—President Clinton signed into law the Shark Finning Prohibition Act, a landmark law that prohibited finning in U.S. waters. Unless a government demands that boats land sharks with their fins intact, authorities need to make elaborate calculations to ensure these operators aren’t taking sharks simply to supply the fin trade. A shark that comes onto shore has typically been “dressed,” meaning its head, fins, and guts have been removed. As a result, this dressed weight is half the full weight of a live shark, and the law Clinton signed dictated the fins brought ashore should not account for more than 5 percent of the total dressed weight of sharks on board. These restrictions applied only to ships sailing under the U.S. flag, however, not to foreign vessels in American waters.

  Other countries have followed suit, but with varying degrees of success. The tiny country of Palau made history on September 25, 2009, when its president, Johnson Toribiong, declared the first nationwide shark sanctuary, banning shark fishing in all of Palau’s waters on the grounds that the activity threatened both the local ecosystem and the nation’s tourism industry. Within six months, both Honduras and the Maldives had taken similar measures, creating their own sanctuaries.

  Nations including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and Oman have all taken the more modest step of imposing some sort of shark-finning restrictions. But while Ecuador imposed a ban on both shark harvesting and the export of shark fins in October 2004, Asian fishermen regularly catch sharks in areas such as the nationally protected Galápagos, sometimes with the assistance of Ecuadorean naval officers. Roughly 80 percent of Ecuador’s shark exports originate in the Galápagos: WildAid estimates that the monthly volume of dried shark fin coming from the archipelago’s largest island, Isabela, averages fifteen hundred kilograms, which equates to three thousand dead sharks.7 Illegal fishing operations continue to poach sharks from Costa Rica’s Cocos Island marine reserve and Panama’s Coiba National Park. Many of the pledges other countries have made, like signing on to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s 1999 International Plan of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks, have yet to translate into action.

  Even well-meaning government officials in many countries often make tentative attempts to curb shark finning, only to encounter fierce political resistance. Yolanda Kakabadse, who served as Ecuador’s environment minister between 1998 and 2000, learned shortly after taking office that her plan to eliminate shark finning in the Galápagos had little chance of success. “In the Galápagos, the population is so small that every group is important,” she says. Artisanal fishing groups—a faction pitted against Kakabadse’s reform proposal—can actually mobilize voters, so she found little presidential support for her plan. Moreover, the fact that scientists have difficulty assessing the exact count of a given shark population made it impossible for her to make her case within the cabinet. “I couldn’t get the information I needed to back it up,” she explains.

  Few activists have fought harder to push their government on the issue than Randall Arauz, president of the Costa Rican shark conservation group Pretoma. Arauz didn’t even start out focused on sharks; in the 1990s he and colleagues were monitoring leatherback turtles. In an effort to find out how fishing was damaging endangered leatherbacks, one of Arauz’s friends signed up to work on a fishing vessel and brought a video camera, claiming he was simply making home movies. In the process, he captured shark finning on video, and the activists realized that the leatherbacks were, in Arauz’s words, “collateral damage” in the drive to kill sharks. An end to shark finning and the twenty-five hundred international flag vessels cruising the eastern Pacific, they reasoned, would save the turtles as well.

  In 2001, Pretoma launched a campaign to end shark finning. The Costa Rican fishermen were supportive; they didn’t see selling shark fins as an important source of income. In 2003, Pretoma secretly videotaped four boats landing shark fins on private docks, and its public relations campaign exploded, fueled by public outrage. But institutional forces in Costa Rica have thwarted Arauz’s efforts for over a decade. Representatives of large fishing interests dominate the workings of the Costa Rican Fishery and Aquaculture Institute, known by its initials, INCOPESCA, prompting regulators to adopt loophole-ridden rules time and time again. Arauz has challenged these regulations on multiple occasions, and he wins, but these court rulings have yet to translate into a sufficiently strong ban on finning. Costa Rica is seen from the outside as a world leader on a host of conservation causes, but Arauz argues his compatriots need to end their schizophrenic approach to fishing policy: “Are we going to be the shark savers of the world, or the culprits?”

  International mechanisms to protect sharks remain a work in progress, since the global community has not demonstrated the political will to curb the activities that threaten sharks the most. David A. Balton, who has served as deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, sounds a little rueful when he talks about things like the UN’s 1999 International Plan of Action. “It had a lot of good words in it” is the way he puts it. When it comes to dealing with managing sharks in international waters—which, after all, is where most sharks swim—he says, “There aren’t that many governments that are hyped up about it, at least until recently. We’re a long way from where we need to be.” Issuing official statements about the need to preserve sharks is not the same thing as protecting them, especially when governments across the globe will have to collaborate on enforcing fishing restrictions on the high seas.

  The Bush administration pressed for further restrictions close to shore, and in 2008 it adopted a rule mandating any shark landed from the Atlantic must have its fins attached—the strictest rule possible. Environmentalists still criticize the federal government for some aspects of its shark management, such as allowing the overfishing of spiny dogfish and sandbar sharks and still permitting the fishing of hammerhead, oceanic whitetip, and porbeagle sharks, but they see the United States as the least of their problems as they push to halt sharks’ global decline. In 2010 Hawaii banned the sale, possession, or distribution of shark fins and fin products statewide, and the United States made fins attached the law of the land.

  One of the biggest obstacles to adopting any meaningful protections for sharks is that they have to be negotiated in large unwieldy forums, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). The fact that ICCAT doesn’t even have the word “shark” in its name gives a sense of how high they rank on the priority list. These sprawling international meetings are filled with all the drama and maneuvering of a high-school model-UN exercise, where delegates from pro-fishing countries such as Japan, Norway, and Iceland block consensus and use a variety of techniques to run down the clock as delegates pack their bags and prepare to leave. Since 2002, CITES has managed to impose stricter trade rules on three of the most charismatic shark species: basking, whale, and great white sharks. But when asked to provide protections for species that have real economic value, the delegates have balked.

  Which is why, after spending several years lobbying to strengthen American laws on shark harvesting, Sonja Fordham decided she would be better off heading across the Atlantic to deal with the Europeans herself.

  Europeans—who crave sharks for their meat rather than their fins—initially set their sights on their own fishing grounds, but have expanded these over time as they’ve depleted one area of the ocean after the other. Once shark populations took a dive in the North Sea and the Mediterranean, they turned to waters off America’s shores, but now they’re close to decimating those hunting grounds as well. U.S. authorities have started cracking down on shark catches in recent years, limiting the number of animals that can be brought to shore each year. At the moment
the European Union is in the midst of a wrenching debate, as member nations discuss whether to alter the course of fishing they have pursued for centuries. Spaniards rank among the most aggressive fishermen in the world, and they have traditionally dictated the European Union’s shark-hunting rules. (Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France make up a fifth of the top twenty shark-fishing nations that account for 80 percent of the world’s catch.) This puts Spaniards and other Europeans among the world’s top suppliers as well as consumers: they now account for nearly a third of Hong Kong’s declared fin imports.

  Enric Sala, a Spanish marine biologist who left academia to become an explorer in residence at National Geographic, knows what it’s like to live in a country obsessed with catching and eating fish. While he has tried his best to convince his countrymen that the world’s oceans are in trouble, they laugh at him. “My friends think I’m crazy, and whenever we go to a restaurant, they say, ‘Look, here’s all the fish we can’t eat.’ Not even my mother makes the connection,” he laments. Despite all the press about fish stocks running low worldwide, “the mentality in Spain hasn’t changed a bit. The problem is they know because we’ve told them, but they still don’t believe it.”

  A 2008 study by Francesco Ferretti, an Italian who received his doctorate at Dalhousie University, testifies to this mentality. Ferretti and his colleagues examined the toll fishing in the Mediterranean over the past two centuries had taken on sharks, looking at the activities of the twenty-one different countries that use it as their fishing grounds. They were able to come up with comprehensive figures for five large, predatory shark species: the one that fared the best, blue sharks, declined 96 percent during that time. The one that suffered the most, hammerhead sharks, declined by more than 99 percent. Sharks, to put it bluntly, are faring worse in the Mediterranean than anywhere else in the world.

  “In Malta, there were places where divers used to be able to see schools of hammerheads. Now it’s science fiction,” Ferretti says. “The fishing pressure is so intense it makes things hard for sharks to stay around.”

  It’s not that Europeans lack shark-finning regulations: it’s just that they contain massive loopholes. In 2003 the EU adopted rules that allow fishing vessels to land fins that account for up to 5 percent of the live weight—rather than the dressed weight—of the total shark catch. Under this policy, member nations can determine how this translates as a percentage of the dressed weight, which is much lower than the whole weight. Spain and Portugal have decided this amounts to between 11 and 12 percent of the dressed weight, a ratio that is twice as lenient as the U.S. standard. On top of that, they can land carcasses and fins separately, which makes any controls meaningless.

  Almost no ocean-wide international shark catch limits exist. The EU has set some restrictions on a handful of species in the North Sea, but these limits regularly exceed the numbers marine scientists recommend. A few people who have grown up on the North Sea, like Struan Stevenson, know exactly what that kind of activity portends for the ocean.

  Stevenson was born in Ballantrae, Scotland, and after serving as a councilman in South Ayrshire for nearly a quarter of a century, he now spends much of his time in Brussels, arguing over fish. He is a green Conservative in the mold of the British prime minister, David Cameron, who imbues his environmental crusades with a bit of anti-regulatory rhetoric. First elected to the European Parliament in 1999, Stevenson chaired its Fisheries Committee between 2002 and 2004 while simultaneously holding the title of Conservative front-bench spokesman on fisheries. He remains a senior member on the Fisheries Committee and considers sharks a key part of his policy portfolio.

  During the course of his lifetime Stevenson has seen the collapse of small towns that used to thrive on the “Cod is God” philosophy. Cod once filled the North Sea to such an extent, he says, “you could almost walk from Scotland to Norway on their backs.” Whole communities sprang up in his country based on fishing cod, but “they’re virtual ghost towns now.” Now a new phrase is gaining popularity in Scotland, as fishermen struggle with dwindling catch quotas and diminishing fish stocks: “Sod the cod.” Having seen Scottish fishermen’s livelihoods dry up, Stevenson now adheres to a precautionary approach when it comes to regulating the seas. Roughly translated, it goes something like this: setting fishing limits now will stave off disaster later.

  The Spaniards have yet to accept Stevenson’s reasoning, arguing that activists are overestimating the risks associated with overfishing and that nations have the right to explore the seas to satisfy consumer demand. Spanish fishing interests have already scaled back their operations and reduced the number of vessels they send out to sea, they point out, so further limits would damage their livelihoods.

  Debating rules over shark finning in the European Parliament has a sort of comedic quality. During a debate in September 2006, when the Spanish delegation was pushing to increase the catch for blue sharks, they circulated an amendment that was only in Spanish. One of the Spanish delegates informed Stevenson it wasn’t fair to put strict limits on the fin-body ratio for blue sharks, because the species have “massive fins, great big fins.” (This isn’t true, anatomically speaking.)

  Ultimately, Stevenson’s side won a small victory when the European Parliament rejected a recommendation from its Fisheries Committee to weaken the shark-finning rules even further. But the vote was not binding, since it’s the European Commission, not the parliament, that sets regulations.

  Even as he has made a small bit of progress within parliament, the red-haired Scotsman received a powerful reminder of the market forces driving the shark fin trade when he went to China on an official delegation trip in 2006. At every official dinner, he recalls, the menu included “shark’s fin soup, and shark’s fin this and shark’s fin that … It was salty and stringy. It was like thin string, like flat noodles.”

  Even when Stevenson makes modest strides in Europe, he is faced with the reality that as long as Chinese consumers demand shark’s fin soup for every important occasion, sharks are headed off the precipice. It’s somewhat akin to the debate Americans and Europeans engage in when discussing what needs to be done in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming: even if the EU and the United States impose strict limits, climate change will accelerate as long as the Chinese build a power plant a week to expand their manufacturing base. Worldwide environmental problems require global solutions, which presents a formidable political and diplomatic challenge. Otherwise, the sharks that escape a European fisherman’s nets will simply be trapped by one in Asia.

  Armando Astudillo winces a lot when discussing sharks; he is a true European bureaucrat, and a diplomat, and he doesn’t like discussing topics that are, in his word, “painful.” (This word comes up several times in our conversation.) Moreover, any fisheries discussion constitutes a political minefield for him as a Spaniard.

  Astudillo, who used to oversee the EU’s fishing fleets before being promoted to head its environment and health unit, is more than willing to acknowledge the EU has not followed up on some of its conservation pledges. “At the end of the day, we didn’t do much in terms of a plan of action,” he says, referring to the 1999 international UN pact. “We take sharks as a resource.”

  From Astudillo’s perspective, managing sharks poses a political and diplomatic problem for Europeans, since it pits one region of the European Union against another. Nongovernmental organizations have raised “a red flag” about the animals’ predicament, which is beginning to resonate with the public. At the same time, agreeing to end shark finning by establishing a ratio of the fin catch to the overall haul “was particularly painful for the Spanish and Portuguese industry … The question was very difficult, very painful.” And it’s impossible not to feel the Spaniards’ pain, he reasons. “In this world, the European Union, decisions are made by a majority within the community. The Spanish fleet is the most important one, in terms of fishing in general.” And Spanish fishing interests, he adds, continue to complain
that they cannot meet the EU’s rather laid-back standard when it comes to sharks.

  It’s not that Astudillo questions the scientific basis for these restrictions: he questions the European Union’s political will. “If you are willing to protect sharks, what we know now is sufficient,” he says. “The problem is, it is not an easy task. Some people would say, ‘Why bother?’ ” And Europeans, he adds, like their shark. “You can go into any market in Brussels, you can find blue shark, mako shark,” he points out. “I have actually tried it. It’s not bad at all.”

  Spending just a few minutes with Javier Garat Pérez, secretary-general of Confederación Española de Pesca, gives one a sense of the delicate task EU officials such as Astudillo face. With 1,450 fishing companies as members, the association Garat heads ranks as the biggest in Europe. These companies own a total of 1,650 vessels, of which 500 are large ships. Garat is not afraid to spend time with environmentalists: he regularly journeys to meetings like the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, which took place in Barcelona in October 2008. Garat preaches a message of moderation, saying that his members are just as interested in sustaining shark populations over the long term, because they have become concerned recently about the declining price of shark meat. “They say some species should be prohibited [from being caught]. We are ready to accept that,” he says of environmentalists. “What we hope to have is a future with shark fisheries. Now is when we want to take measures, to avoid worse measures in the future.”