A bill before the House would ban the sale of shark fins — considered a delicacy in many Asian cultures — to stop the already illegal practice of shark finning.
Shark finning is the practice of catching sharks and cutting off their fins, often while the animal is still alive, then throwing the body of shark back into the ocean. The practice has been outlawed for 18 years in the U.S.
California Democratic Rep. Edward Royce authored the bill to ban fin sales and defended his proposal Tuesday before the House Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans — one of the six subcommittees under the Committee on Natural Resources.
“The bill does not prohibit shark fishing. The proposal builds on previous congressional action targeting the shark fin trade, and it mirrors similar state level bans.” GOP Rep. Edward Royce of California told the committee. “It makes an awful lot of sense economically.”
At the top of the food chain, sharks are often the predators of the predators — sharks defend fish lower on the food chain by killing others that hunt them. Fishermen catch the fish sharks indirectly save, fueling the fishing industry, Royce argued.
While shark finning is illegal in the United States, selling shark fins is not. Fishermen are allowed to sell the fins of sharks they catch, provided they bring the rest of the shark to port with fins still attached.
The ban could cut fishermen out of a much-needed source of revenue, the fish huntsmen said. Florida’s King’s Seafood owner John Polston spoke in front of the committee against Royce’s bill. Polston has been involved with fisheries for over three decades and said the ban would force some small fisheries into bankruptcy.
A larger problem with the bill is it indirectly encourages other nations with less sustainable fishing practices to pick up the slack the United States leaves. After the U.S. stops exporting sustainably harvested shark fins, other nations will rely more heavily on less-humane fisheries operating under less regulation, Polston said.
Mote Marine Laboratory’s Center for Shark Research Director Robert Hueter and Simon Fraser University Marine Biologist David Shiffman studied the effects of a ban such as in Royce’s bill and found “this approach would fall short of providing the type of U.S. leadership that is needed for effective shark conservation around the world.”
“U.S. shark fisheries have become some of the best managed in the world, and many of our shark fisheries are healthy or rebounding from past overexploitation,” Hueter said in front of the committee.
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