Since the 1950s industrial fishing pressure has increased 18 times. Many populations of pelagic fish like swordfish and tuna have declined severely and sharks have suffered most. Scientists estimate that 71% of sharks have been fished from the oceans and 77% of pelagic, or open ocean species are gone. Much of the driving force behind hunting sharks is created by the demand for shark fin soup; a luxury dish primarily consumed in China and SE Asia, but also countries outside of Asia like the USA. This demand, associated with a vast economic spending power among Chinese has led to a gold- rush for shark fin and the associated fishing prcatice known as shark finning. Shark finning is the cruel fishing practice that involves slicing off sharks’ fins and throwing the mutilated shark’s bodies, alive or dead, back into the ocean to drown, bleed to death or be eaten by other animals.
To address this, President Bill Clinton signed the Shark Finning Prohibition Act was signed into law December 21, 2000, making it unlawful to possess a shark fin in US waters without a corresponding carcass. The Shark Finning Prohibition Act forbade finning by any vessels in the US Exclusive Economic Zone (up to 200 nautical miles from offshore). The Act makes it illegal for the possession of shark fins by any USA flagged fishing vessels in international waters. It also prohibited any fishing vessel from landing at a U.S. port with shark fins whose weight exceeds 5% of the total weight of shark carcasses landed or on board.
Loopholes in the ban, however, prevented effective enforcement, and finning continued in a different manner with sharks allowed to be landed with fins detached. This loophole allowed unscrupulous fishermen to catch and kill more sharks than accounted for, and to mix the more coveted fins from endangered and protected species with other sharks. To help address this, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued regulations in 2008 mandating that sharks must be landed with fins attached in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, but not the Pacific.
On January 4, 2011 President Barack Obama signed the Shark Conservation Act into law. The Shark Conservation Act extends the requirement for all vessels in US waters to ban finning and require landing sharks with fins attached (with the exemption of the East Coast Spiny Dogfish), and prohibits the transfer of shark fins at sea. Landing sharks with fins detached is still allowed by the EU.
The Shark Conservation Act makes it illegal to:
- remove any of the fins of a shark (including the tail) and discard the carcass of the shark at sea;
- have custody, control, or possession of any such fin aboard a fishing vessel without the corresponding carcass; or
- land any such fin without the corresponding carcass.
Shark finning has driven huge population declines, causing a huge impact on the health and balance of other marine species and ecosystems.
Shark finning is the practice where living sharks’ fins are sliced off and their mutilated bodies thrown back into the ocean, where the sharks endure long, painful deaths. Driven by the demand for driven by shark fin soup, the most recent estimate of sharks killed each year is between 76 million and 80 million sharks per year.
Shark fin soup and the trade of shark fins continued in the US despite shark finning regulations. Many of the fins were from sharks landed by US fisheries for domestic consumption in Chinatowns in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. However, most of the fins were exported, primarily through the major trade hubs of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Thousands of tons of dried shark fins were also imported into the US for re-export including fins from endangered and vulnerable species. To address the cruel and largely unsustainable trade of shark fin, groups like Humane Society USA, the Animal Welfare Institute Shark Stewards and others endeavored to educate consumers and to make the trade and sale of shark fin illegal. Starting in Hawaii, momentum built to pass legislation to ban the sale and trade of shark fins and shark fin products like shark fin soup, in 13 other US states. This legislation had strong bipartisan support, and the support of Asian American and Pacific Island communities, and led to a federal ban after 4 congressional attempts.
The passage of the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which President Biden signed into law in December 2022, made the sale and trade of shark fins illegal throughout the USA. This Act, followed that of Canada, and Shark Steward’s efforts are now directed at similar legislation in the EU, a major shark fisher and exporter of shark fin.
The trade in shark fin continues globally however. Species like scalloped hammerhead sharks and oceanic whitetip sharks are critically endangered with only a small percentage of their populations remaining. Shark Stewards is working to increase restrictions in the shark fin trade by up-listing these sharks under the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) and listing new species to protect them from this harmful trade.