OLDER THAN TREES, THE SHARKS HAVE POPULATED THE planet longer than almost every other living organism. Throughout their 450-million-year existence, sharks have survived five extinction-level events, but today, the species is staring down its greatest threat.
In the past fifteen years alone, the scalloped hammerhead, great white, and thresher shark populations are believed to have fallen by more than 75 percent. During this same period, the oceanic whitetip shark population has declined by at least 80 percent. All told, according to Boris Worm, professor of marine conservation and biology at Dalhousie University, the number of sharks killed per year is 100 million, though it’s possible the number could be as high as 273 million.1 The continued massacre of sharks around the world each year is the result of several factors, but the biggest culprit is the overexploitation of the oceans.
Far from the eyes of the world, fishing vessels prowl the high seas, which is defined as ocean areas outside the 200-mile territorial jurisdiction of coastal nations. The high seas officially cover 64 percent of the world’s ocean surface. Across the planet, one-third of all marine fish stocks are fished at unsustainable levels, and the remaining two-thirds are maximally sustainably fished, meaning there is no more fish that can be removed without harming the yield.2 This practice is proving ruinous to local economies and the world’s fish stock. It is also putting the shark species at the greatest risk at any time in its history.
China plays an outsize role in this destruction. As one of the world’s largest suppliers of seafood, including seafood destined for the United States, China also imports and reexports the vast majority of the world’s shark fins. Controlling 20 percent of the world’s seafood market, China showcases an armada of 200,000 fishing vessels and 2,500 distant-water vessels. Ten times the size of the United States’ distant-water fleet, China’s fleet is unrivaled on the high seas and, arguably, in the history of humankind.
Despite possessing some of the best fishing grounds in the world, the United States controls only 6 percent of the world’s seafood market. And, while China’s percentage share increases annually, the share of the United States has been in regular decline.3 Over the previous two decades, China has been responsible for most of the growth in worldwide fish availability per capita. One of the drivers of the dramatic expansion in China’s fish production is the country’s voracious appetite for fish, a taste that has been fueled by growing domestic income and wealth. Fish consumption in China has increased steadily, rising from 14 kilograms per capita in 1993 to 40 kilograms in 2013.4 That’s an average annual growth rate of 5 percent.5
Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit organization that monitors global fishing efforts, spent five years monitoring fishing ships from various countries. They estimated that Chinese vessels spent 17 million hours fishing in international waters in 2016, which easily exceeds the nine other leading countries combined. In comparison, Taiwan, which registered the second highest hours according to Global Fishing Watch, clocked an estimated 2.2 million hours, while the United States, clocking in slightly fewer than 2 million hours, comes in ninth in the Top 15 Fishing Nations.6 Between 2000 and 2012, according to the European Parliament, China’s distant-water fleet caught 4.6 million tons per year globally, or more than ten times the 368,000 tons per year China reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.7 Chinese fishing fleets account for nearly 40 percent (34.7 percent) of the world’s total haul. Combined, the next five leading countries—Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Japan, and Ecuador—account for 36.4 percent of the world’s total. (The United States accounts for 2.1 percent.)8
THE CHINESE DISTANT-WATER FLEET, WHICH ROAMS THE world from Central and South America across the Pacific to Oceania to South Korea, puts the world’s fish stock at risk. China’s fishing bureau, which is part of its department of agriculture, issues licenses to local firms to fish overseas. With its huge fishing fleet, China has an outsize impact on various fisheries around the world, especially in areas that lack local competition. Chinese vessels have been well documented overfishing in other counties’ exclusive economic zones, or EEZs. Africa is a prime example. The ocean waters off West Africa represent one of the most productive fishing grounds in the world. The cold water from the Benguela Current mixes with warm water from the South Equatorial Current. That mixing of oxygen-rich cold water with warm water creates a surge in sea life. For centuries, African artisanal fishermen have launched their small brightly colored boats to fish these waters, taking only enough from the blue waters to feed their families and communities. That world has been upended. An unfamiliar new silhouette has appeared on the horizon, and a new sound of throbbing engines is now heard above the surf. An armada of Chinese fishing vessels now dominates the waters of West Africa with more than 500 industrial fishing vessels operating in the region. Their ships have swooped down and taken huge catches with estimates as high as 2.8 million tons worth $7 billion.9 Local fishermen are squeezed out of their livelihoods along the entire coast of Africa by the might of the Chinese. Impoverished countries like Ghana and Guinea-Bissau are unable to find enough fish to satisfy the demand for food and jobs. Yet Africa is not alone in suffering at the hands of China’s fishing operation.
But what happens when those firms violate local fishing laws? Usually nothing, unless the Chinese are forced to respond to a particularly blatant violation of the law. Indonesia, for instance, is trying to crack down on illegal fishing in its waters. In the past five years, Indonesian officials have seized and destroyed approximately 500 fishing boats. While several countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia are fishing illegally in their waters, Chinese vessels have also been implicated. Recently, Indonesian authorities seized the 598-ton fishing boat Fu Yuan Yu 831, which had 35 tons of fish and protected tiger sharks on board. The Chinese fishing boat had flown the flag of Timor-Leste and had on board five other national flags—those of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore—an action that violates international law. The boat is listed as being owned by Fuzhou Hongdong Pelagic Fishery Co. Ltd., which is based in Fuzhou, China.10
While the consumption of shark-fin soup has fallen in China—although consumption is, admittedly, difficult to quantify—due to increased conservation and an official ban of shark-fin soup at state functions, this decline is offset by the rising demand for the soup in markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Wealthy urban Thais are now regularly serving the soup at business meetings and family events, and in Macau, the country’s booming casino and hotel industry has led to a spike in demand from wealthy patrons for the soup. (Of the thirty new hotels built in Macau, twenty-eight feature shark-fin soup in their restaurants.)11
At the same time, sharks are now regularly targeted as a primary catch—and not just for their fins. To keep up with the international demand for seafood, fisheries have been going after shark for its meat. Between 2000 and 2011, for instance, trade in shark meat rose an astounding 42 percent.12 Brazil, in particular, has experienced an eightfold rise in shark meat imports since 2000, making it the world’s largest importer of shark meat.13 Over this same period, Spain emerged as the world’s third largest producer of shark catch, behind only Indonesia and India. From 2002 to 2011, Spanish fleets captured more than 61,000 tons of “sharks, rays, and chimeras,” exporting a larger percentage of its shark meat to European markets, most notably Italy, the continent’s top consumer of shark meat.14 While China consumes the most shark fins, and imports and reexports the vast majority of shark fins around the world, the country was only the seventh largest importer of shark meats from 2000 to 2011, though, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, its shark meat export industry has been trending upward in recent years.15
In addition to their fins and meat, sharks are killed for squalene, which is used to manufacture cosmetics like lipstick and lotions, and for their skins, which are used to produce everything from shoes and handbags to sandpaper.
Caught in the vise of globalization, sharks and shark-derived products are shipped around the world like fruits and vegetables. They are now a big business, and the total value of shark exports today is worth approximately half a billion dollars.16 Even factoring in a marginal decrease in the consumption of shark-fin soup around the world, then, the parallel increase in demand for shark meat and other shark-derived products means the casualty rate of sharks around the world remains stubbornly high.
If this current rate continues, some shark species could face further degradation. The pelagic, or deep-water, sharks are particularly vulnerable. Of the thirty-nine species of pelagic sharks, seventeen are threatened with extinction, largely due to fishing on the high seas.17 One of these is the thresher, which is currently listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. Further exploitation of this shark can result in humankind losing a remarkable predator, a marvel of the animal kingdom. The thresher attacks its prey with an elongated tail, whipping its sicklelike tail over its head at a remarkable 80 miles per hour. The thresher is the only ocean creature with the ability to kill with its tail. If the thresher were to disappear from the world’s oceans, its absence as an apex predator would cause an almost immediate trophic cascade. The loss of this magnificent species could prove disastrous to the world’s oceans—to say nothing of what its loss would mean psychologically and emotionally to humans, who are unable or unwilling to act as responsible stewards of the planet.
To prevent such immeasurable losses, how fishing is regulated on the high seas needs to change—not just to protect sharks—but commercial species like tuna, too. As currently constituted, the management of fishing advances the short-term interests of certain states rather than the long-term sustainability of fish stocks around the world. Protesting voices are ignored, and it’s akin to killing a guard dog to keep the sheep safe.
The regulatory framework is made up of a patchwork of entities called regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), which were established when we believed ocean resources were unlimited. These seventeen international groups are made up of countries that share a financial interest in managing and conserving fish stocks. Of these groups, five are the so-called tuna RFMOs, which cover 91 percent of the world’s oceans and manage fisheries for tuna. They are also responsible for sharks, seabirds, and turtles affected by fishing.
One of the largest RFMOs in the world, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) covers the western and central Pacific, where most of the world’s tuna fishing takes place. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, bluefish tuna is overfished in the Pacific. The annual monetary value of the tuna caught in this region is $6 billion. Driven more by decisions to protect vested interests than preserving the long-term viability of the tuna industry, RFMOs like the WCPFC have failed to reduce and restrict the number of fishing vessels at sea. Moreover, they ignore the scientific advice to limit catches, because heeding such warnings would constrain fish-processing industries. The RFMOs have failed to prevent overexploitation of migratory fish stocks, to rebuild overexploited fish, and to prevent the further degradation of marine ecosystems.
Shark management in the Atlantic is no better than in the Pacific. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) governs all commercial fisheries in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea for the group’s fifty-two contracting parties, the affected nations, and other governmental organizations. Like the Pacific’s RFMOs, the Atlantic commission is responsible for the conservation of tuna and sharks and other maritime species. All the major shark species, including great whites, swim in these waters. And, while scientists cannot estimate the great white population in the Mediterranean, great white sightings are occasionally made around the Greek islands, the Strait of Sicily, and the Strait of Gibraltar. Critically threatened, the white shark is close to being ranked as endangered.
Unfortunately, data used to determine the rate of fishing mortality, a key parameter to gauge the health of shark stocks, is self-reported and, therefore, often unreliable. Fishermen may underreport or even not report shark captures. A study was undertaken to figure out the mortality rate of the mako population.18 Tracking data of forty satellite-tagged makos showed that they travel so widely that they swam through the management zones of nineteen different countries, which illustrates the importance of countries working closely together to conserve makos. More important, the data showed that 30 percent of the forty satellite-tagged mako sharks19 were killed in commercial fisheries, ten times the previous estimate. The death rate for any mako over a calendar year in the North Atlantic is 30 percent.20
Recognizing this, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which also advocates for the protection of the oceans and more sustainable maritime activities, calls for a complete halt of all mako catches in the North Atlantic to help increase the chances of rebuilding the stock by 2040.21 This recommendation is in line with the same advice of ICCAT’s own scientific committee. In addition, WWF is calling on ICCAT to adopt further precautionary measures, such as the implementation of a long-term management plan to protect threatened blue sharks, a species in high demand from the fin soup market. As a natural scavenger, the blue shark helps keep the ocean clean. But because it instinctually goes after baited hooks from longline vessels, this evolutionary task puts the species at particular risk. Every year, 20 million blue sharks are caught around the world. Throughout the Mediterranean, Spanish fishing fleets, which harvest these waters for swordfish, catch blue sharks as bycatch. They then export most of the blue shark fins to Hong Kong, where they can comprise 60 percent of the shark fins for sale.
As a result, the IUCN ranks blue sharks as near threatened, a rank better than makos and threshers. Since the regulatory authorities refuse to develop a plan to save the blue shark, however, it is likely to suffer the same fate as the endangered whale shark. While scientists continue to grapple with the loss of blue sharks, it’s likely the sharks’ increased vulnerability would lead to an explosion of squid populations around the world, which will threaten the existence of fry and tuna populations.
Sharks are not the only species being overfished in the Atlantic where Chinese vessels roam. The ICCAT’s scientific committee provides tuna population assessments to the tuna fisheries’ management team annually. What they’ve found is disturbing. Several tuna species are exploited beyond sustainability. Commercial fishermen in the Atlantic have been overfishing bigeye tuna populations there by 20 percent over the total allowable catch (TAC) in the past two years, even though the ICCAT adopted a recovery plan for the species in 2015. At current levels, scientists estimate that the chances of the stock’s total collapse by 2033 is around 60 percent, worse odds than a coin toss. The same statistic is true for yellowfin tuna, which has been overfished for years. The current catch exceeds the ICCAT’s allowable limit by 36 percent. Despite clear advice from its scientific committee, and other conservation groups like the WWF, the ICCAT did not adopt a comprehensive management plan to address the overfishing of tropical tuna during its annual meeting in November 2018.
What’s worse, that same year, the ICCAT increased the total allowable catch for bluefin tuna to 36,000 tons, the highest total allowable quota by the international commission. While scientists continue to warn that bluefin tuna stock will decrease significantly at this level, ICCAT’s new quota takes effect in 2020. The ongoing overfishing of bluefin as well as tropical tuna combined with a massive illegal trade in bluefin tuna have continued unaddressed for years.
The decision to ignore the scientific advice and to postpone any action to address the overfishing of yellowfin tuna and of the already-threatened bigeye tuna population is likely to undermine the tenuous recovery of these species. It’s highly disappointing to see that there is no serious political will to guarantee the full legality and sustainability of these fisheries. Policy makers as well as consumers should be more aware of the value of tuna as a key natural resource, instead of looking at it as a mere commodity to exploit.
Because RFMOs in the Pacific and Atlantic have been unable or unwilling to curtail the overexploitation of the large fishing fleets of China and other countries, smaller island countries and conservation organizations around the world are taking small, but important, steps to do so. Many Pacific Island countries recognize that current fishing practices could put the tuna fishing industry in peril. Actions by these coastal states, including Palau and Papua New Guinea, and a call for a new approach for managing the Pacific Ocean’s tuna fisheries can reverse the situation before it is too late. One of the easiest actions for the coastal states is to introduce legislation to reduce the overcapacity of fishing vessels in territorial fishing waters. Another key action is to ban transshipment immediately, at sea and in port. Transshipment, as discussed in chapter 8, allows fishing vessels to launder fish, skirting a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) protocol. Transferring catch to reefers in the open ocean allows vessels to declare their catch as having been caught on the high seas, free from local jurisdiction and taxes. The Chinese vessels make use of transshipment constantly and record the greatest number of encounters with reefer ships.22 The concomitant loss of earnings to the states in the Pacific are unknown. The lost fees could be anywhere from hundreds of millions to more than a billion dollars. Surprisingly, no RFMO has prohibited the transfer of catches at sea from longline vessels to reefers or other ships. Bubba Cook is the Western Central Pacific tuna program manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). He focuses on the sustainable management of tuna throughout the region. “Transshipment on the high seas should be prohibited unless countries can unequivocally prove it is impracticable for the vessel’s operation, which they have either been unwilling or unable to do for years, and subject to unassailable oversight,” he told me in a telephone interview, adding that transshipment makes it all too easy for illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing to take place.
Many Pacific Island countries have similarly started calling for key areas in the western and central Pacific Ocean to be closed off to all fishing to protect fish populations until existing sea life can recover in full. In the past two years, more of the ocean has been set aside for protection than during any other period in history. In 2017, for example, the governments of Chile, Palau, and New Caledonia either expanded or created marine parks, committing to protect nearly 3.8 million square kilometers (1.47 million square miles) of ocean. The Chilean government, which is a global leader in ocean protection and conservation, signed into law in 2018 protections for nearly 450,000 square miles of water—an area roughly the size of Texas, California, and West Virginia combined. Split into three regions, the largest is the Rapa Nui Marine Protected Area, where industrial fishing and mining are prohibited, but traditional fishing is allowed. More than 40 percent of Chilean waters have some level of legal protection. And, in 2009, Palau became the first nation in the world to create a shark sanctuary. All types of shark fishing are prohibited within the sanctuary, which covers roughly 230,000 square miles, an area equal to the size of France. Palau’s action inspired other countries—the Maldives, Honduras, the Bahamas, and Tokelau—to establish their own shark sanctuaries. Officials in Palau, which has a population of only 20,000 inhabitants scattered across 200 islands, want to see a total ban on shark fishing.
“The ocean needs sharks more than it needs people,” Wes Pratt told me. “And I would have larger marine protected areas. There was an Australian study that said that you needed to protect at least 40 percent of the Great Barrier Reef in order to have sustainability. We don’t come close to that. We’ve got a lot of great effort and a lot of great people making marine protected areas, but to protect the oceans and the ecosystem and the coral reefs and the whole—everything in between—we need to fence off more of the ocean and leave sharks to do their long-term slow conservative business.”
Human activities have led to a global decline in marine biodiversity of approximately 50 percent, roughly half of what it was fifty years ago. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has called for at least a 30 percent increase in the portion of the ocean that is highly protected to help effectively conserve biodiversity. Less than 3 percent of the oceans are currently protected, a dishearteningly low percentage that includes the planet’s two largest reserves—the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area off Antarctica and the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands—which were designated marine parks in 2016. The United Nations and countries around the world need to increase this percentage to maintain the ocean’s health and to protect the livelihood of fishermen around the world.
Unless additional areas are set aside, endangered fish such as whale sharks, the ocean’s gentle giant, will continue to suffer from the fishing onslaught. Whale sharks, which are killed for their skins, fins, and oil-rich livers, are currently listed as endangered. Because whale sharks excrete potassium, phosphorous, nitrogen, and other nutrients essential to the health of the ocean, their traveling from the surface to 3,300 feet below distributes these nutrients throughout their underwater ecosystem. Similarly, when whale sharks die of natural causes, their carcasses sink to the ocean floor, where they continue to excrete nutrients as they decay. An increase in designated marine areas to protect whale sharks would allow the species to continue to play a vital role in maintaining this ecosystem far into the future. Without them, their future—and the future of this ecosystem—remains in doubt.
Marine sanctuaries are often opposed by those with an interest in exploiting the ocean’s resources. The fishing industry argues that everything must remain until others can prove that a marine sanctuary will improve fish conservation, rather than expecting the international fishing industry—and countries like China who stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue and their healthy percentage of the market share—to prove their aggressive fishing practices aren’t depleting the world’s fish population. Regardless, the evidence is clear that marine-protected areas help protect sharks, or at least give the 450-million-year-old species a fighting chance at survival.
SOME COASTAL STATES IN THE PACIFIC WANT AN IMMEDIATE end to longline fishing in their economic zones. They understand the devastation that the longline operations bring. Globally, it has been estimated that approximately 300,000 sea turtles (comprised of 250,000 loggerheads and 60,000 leatherback sea turtles) are hooked and killed by longlines every year. In addition, 160,000 seabirds are killed annually.
If coastal states in the Pacific end longline fishing in their economic zones, fishermen can turn to other effective methods for catching tuna. Pole-and-line fishing has been practiced for centuries. The method involves attracting a school of tuna to the side of a bait boat by throwing live sardines and anchovies overboard. The tuna enter into a feeding frenzy and are caught on the hooks. They are then hauled out of the water, one at a time, using pole and line. The size of the tuna caught this way is usually small, mostly consisting of albacore and skipjack, but oftentimes valuable yellowfin tuna are also snared. More important, bycatch of unwanted animals is reduced. One benefit of switching from longline to pole-and-line fishing is the comparatively high employment that would ensue from replacing large-scale industrial fisheries with smaller boats and more manpower. Consumers who want to buy sustainably produced tuna might vote with their pocketbook by buying pole-caught tuna. So coastal states can pursue pole-and-line fishing; however, it cannot meet the world’s demand for tuna. In 1950 this method met the demand of 2.5 billion people on the planet, but now with the world’s population at 7.7 billion and rising, industrial-scale fishing is required.
As problematic as it is, the worldwide fishing industry is crucial for human sustenance and jobs. Fish provide 3.2 billion people with almost 20 percent of their average per capita intake of animal protein.23 In addition, 540 million people around the world live by fishing. Countries should no longer be allowed to fish in a way that puts fish species at risk when the technology exists for sustainable fisheries. The community of nations can no longer stand on the sidelines when the behavior of a few nations threatens the world’s fishing industries. Why should the livelihood of millions of people be put at risk for the benefit of a few?
If the world wants to preserve the shark and tuna populations, which in turn preserve the planet’s maritime ecosystem, a large portion of the world’s food supply, and a vital sector of the world’s workforce, then we must start action to reform the current inadequate fishing management structure. The RFMOs could easily fix the shark-finning massacre. WWF and other NGOs have proposed that all RFMOs should require vessels catching sharks to keep the shark’s fins attached to the body to make sure that meat is not wasted when the ship comes back to port. Technically, the RFMOs hang on to a similar, but ultimately ineffective rule. If a vessel keeps shark fins, they are required to retain enough of the shark carcass to ensure the fin-to-carcass ratio does not exceed 5 percent. The reality is that this regulation is window dressing. The fins are not even required to be stored in the same place as the carcasses. So a pile of dried fins might be stored in the bow of the ship while a mass of frozen shark carcasses is held in the freezer that might only represent a fraction of the representative fins. Because RFMO officers have to count every fin and compare it to every carcass to comply with this ratio requirement, enforcement is impractical and cost prohibitive. If a more comprehensive “fins attached” rule were put into place—working in conjunction with the kind of ban on transshipment Bubba Cook at the WWF calls for—the practice of shark-finning would then become cost prohibitive.
Humans are now the dominant species on earth, and whether we like it or not, this position requires stewardship of the planet. The world is struggling today with illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing. We can no longer allow China—or any other country—to decimate the shark and tuna species. The planet will not survive if a powerful few countries, including other Asian nations, continue to profit from the destruction of maritime species essential to the health of the oceans. The time has come for the less powerful to rally together to protect sharks, tuna, and the fishermen who legally and sustainably harvest them. The current patchwork of independent RFMOs and individual fishery commissions doesn’t encourage the kind of coordinated, comprehensive, and regulatory approach to fishery management and maritime conservation required to meet this increasingly dire emergency. A new approach, modeled on the efforts by the governments of Chile, Palau, and New Caledonia and the work of the IUCN, is necessary to protect the ocean’s resources, and in the long run, such a unified worldwide approach will be good for all nations. The time has come to change the way tuna and sharks are managed and put an end to the exploitation taking place on the high seas before it is too late. If we act now, these two valuable species, which belong to us all, can be preserved for the benefit of generations to come.