Shark fin soup is a traditional Lunar New Year delicacy, but there have been calls in recent years to ban the ecologically-damaging practice of shark finning. Despite the introduction of anti-finning laws in several countries, including Taiwan, the shark fin trade persists.
To learn more about the shark fin black market and its ethical and environmental implications, TaiwanPlus spoke to Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter and founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project.
To learn more about the shark fin black market and its ethical and environmental implications, TaiwanPlus spoke to Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter and founder of The Outlaw Ocean Project.
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00:00Can you explain what shark finning is and how it impacts the environment?
00:04So shark finning is a process where when sharks are caught, either intentionally or unintentionally,
00:11you cut off the fins, but normally you throw away the rest of the animal,
00:17largely because the meat of the body is, there's not a big market for it, but the fins are prized.
00:24Shark fin soup is, you know, this kind of delicacy that, especially in the last decades,
00:30has been very popular at big festivals, at weddings, and, you know, kind of banquets.
00:36It's a real concern because this specific delicacy is a major driver of the decline in shark stocks around the world.
00:46Last year, a Taiwanese fishing vessel was caught with over six tons of blue shark fins,
00:51with shark finning being outlawed in the country for over a decade.
00:54And similar cases have happened across the world.
00:57Have anti-finning laws been effective in suppressing the trade at all?
01:01Busts that seize large amounts of shark fins are common.
01:08Normally that's because the sale is a very black market sale and it's often transacted at sea from ship to ship.
01:17Laws in the last decade have been passed to criminalize this.
01:21In many places, those laws have loopholes where, for example, if a fisher, a boat captain,
01:28says that this shark was caught incidentally, meaning not on purpose,
01:33it happened to grab on a line that was aimed at tuna,
01:38then the captain is, in many places, allowed to keep the shark or the shark fin.
01:44And that loophole has meant that good laws have not been as effective as they should be.
01:51And what about the crew on fishing vessels? How does the shark finning trade impact them?
01:56There's a really interesting worker rights, labor, human rights issue tied to the shark finning issue,
02:02which is that on many distant water fishing vessels, Chinese and others,
02:06Taiwanese as well, South Korean, especially Asian vessels,
02:12the commerce and capture of sharks is often an off books side gig that is allowed
02:19and even written up in contracts whereby the sharks that are netted or hooked
02:26are often allowed to be finned and kept by the deckhands who are paid below market slave wages.
02:34So there is a weird kind of way in which this particular black market product is plugged into the sea slavery concern
02:43and the really, really abysmal human rights and labor conditions of these crews
02:48because it's used by captains and companies to sort of justify slave wages.