Commercial Incentives
But with shark fins fetching $30 a pound at the dock, fishermen kill the sharks, cut off their fins, and throw the carcass overboard. While there’s a market for shark teeth, oil, meat, and cartilage, the meat spoils quickly unless blast frozen, and few fishing vessels have the right equipment.
     So what lands in the dock in Honolulu and other ports around the world are piles of fins. Shark landings in Hawaii have jumped by more than 20-fold, from 2,289 sharks in 1991 to 60,857 in 1998. And 99 percent of those “sharks” arrived at the dock solely as fins in 1998.
     Nor is finning the only problem confronting sharks. Shark fishing has increased across the board in the past decade, according to statistics compiled by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
     Efforts to manage shark stocks are confounded by shortcomings in the data. Many countries lump shark landings together rather than by individual species, or fail to differentiate between a ton of shark carcasses and a ton of shark fins, even though the latter might represent 50 to 100 times as many individual fish.
     “As a human being I look at it as a waste issue, but as a fisherman I see it as something that can hurt other fisheries,” says Bob Endreson, a retired fisherman who heads the Western Pacific Fisheries Coalition, a Honolulu-based conservation group. “Sharks are a vital part of the overall ecosystem. We don’t know what the result would be if we wipe them out.”
     Finning has been banned on the U.S. Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean coasts following dramatic collapses of many shark populations.

Much Talk, Little Action
Federal and state fisheries officials have joined conservationists in calling for a ban in Hawaiian waters. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for regulating fisheries under the Department of Commerce, has refused to take strong measures to halt the practice.
     Some native Hawaiians have also called for a ban on finning, as many sharks traditionally have powerful spiritual significance. “We don’t worship the sharks like our ancestors did,” says Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell Sr., a cultural practitioner and Christian minister on the island of Maui. “But if our culture is alive in Hawaii, then we need to respect them.”
     Standing on the deck of the Anna, a long-line fishing vessel that practices finning, fisherman Frank Baron says the industry is getting a bad rap. At a time when Hawaii is struggling to find homegrown industries, people should be more worried about maintaining or increasing fisheries jobs than the alleged plight of deepwater sharks, he says.
     “Hawaii should be developing new product lines for shark teeth, cartilage, skin, oil, and meat” says Baron, rather than banning finning, which he agrees is wasteful.
     He also agrees that many coastal shark species are in trouble, but says this is not true of the blue shark, a relatively fast-growing, deepwater species that accounts for 95 percent of the fins landed in Hawaii. “You know how big the Pacific Ocean is?” he asks. “There are plenty of blue sharks out there.”