Research

INTRODUCTION

Human consumption of sharks is widely recognized as a threat to biodiversity loss. Shark defaunation has risen precipitously over a half a century of industrialized fishing. A recent study estimates that shark populations have declined by 71% globally since 1970 (Pacoureau et al. 2021). Another study estimates that a median average of 38 million sharks are harvested annually for human consumption (Clarke et al. 2006). Although the numbers vary year-to-year, shark overfishing and consumption of shark fins are widely recognized as a global problem.

Much of the global shark fin discourse revolves around shark finning, i.e., the practice of removing fins at sea and discarding the body. Shark fins are among the most economically valuable of seafood commodities with a market value of approximately US$400-550 million a year (Clark et al. 2006). Likewise, much of the discourse around consumption focuses on Asian consumers. Scholars argue that with growing economic affluence in East Asia, there has been an increase in global trade and consumption of shark fins (Fong and Anderson 2012). The epicenter of this high-value commodity trade is Hong Kong, which cycles roughly half of the global shark fin trade, a large portion of which consists of threatened species (Cardeñosa et al. 2022).

Hong Kong’s role in shark fin consumption bears on production elsewhere. Global concerns over shark finning and overconsumption, for instance, have influenced environmental policies internationally, such as in the United States where up until 2021 there were 15 states that had implemented totalizing bans on shark fin retail markets. As of December 2022, U.S. Congress passed the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which bans shark fin retail nationwide. These policies are rooted in widespread cultural anxieties around Asian consumption and how so-called "wild" tastes for animals pose a threat to global biodiversity (Byrnes 2020, Rodenbiker 2020, 2023). Conservation campaigns, for instance, often portray Asian people as "super consumers" whose rapacious appetites for wildlife spur species endangerment (Marguiles et al. 2019). These discourses negatively portray acts of consumption through tropes of "exotic" food preferences (Clarke 2006, Teo 2015). Racialized anxieties surrounding global biodiversity loss have come to shape environmental policies across local contexts.

We analyzed multi-scalar dynamics of shark fin production and consumption in an effort to move beyond reductive accounts of Asian threat, which perpetuate cultural misrepresentations (King 2020). Toward this end, this study asks: What are the dynamic interrelations of shark fin production and consumption across geographical locations at global and local scales? How do global processes bear on local practices and vice versa? We address these questions through a dialectical analysis of the global shark fin trade through two localized nodes, Hong Kong markets and U.S. Mid-Atlantic fisheries in New Jersey (NJ). Examining global shark fin production and consumption from these localities, grounds the trade in local social relations, economies, policies, and practices.

We first detail a dialectical conceptual framing for examining global-local relationships, as well as the interdisciplinary methods for the study. Drawing on trade data and interviews with retailers and consumers in Hong Kong, we analyzed social dynamics underlying local consumption and trade, particularly classed, gendered, and intergenerational dimensions. Trade statistics revealed that the fisheries contributing shark fins to the Hong Kong market span five continents. Because demand is high, production is geographically wide ranging. Widespread concerns regarding shark defaunation bear on U.S. environmental policies, specifically shark fin retail bans that, at the time of research, affected the practices of Mid-Atlantic artisanal fishers, but are now poised to transform practices nationwide in the U.S. Interviews and focus group discussions with NJ fishers shed light on the socioeconomic effects of the 2021 shark fin retail ban on livelihoods and the emerging practice of "reverse shark finning," which entails the post-landing removal and discarding of fins. Fishers claim significant economic losses, but also that total shark catches remain the same. This suggests the retail ban is ineffective in reducing total catches in the small-scale fisheries sector. Rather, it produces biological waste and economic loss while failing to incorporate local fishers’ knowledge in environmental policy. Comparing mitochondrial DNA barcoding of shark fins (n = 47) with fishers’ species identification at sea, the study finds that artisanal fishers’ knowledge is sufficient to correctly identify the shark species they catch. Identifying species at sea is important, at the artisanal scale, because there are a number of endangered shark species found in the region. However, some species remain abundant and can sustain regulated harvest. Because local fishers’ knowledge and practices are sufficient to avoid harvesting species of concern, they can be integrated into sustainable fisheries management.

These findings call into question the disjuncture between global defaunation and biodiversity loss and the local effects and outcomes of totalizing shark fin retail bans. Furthermore, we discuss the implications for U.S. environmental policy surrounding the global shark fin trade. Without sufficient analysis of local political economic contexts and interrelations, we contend the "global" remains a scalar abstraction obscuring local realities that bear on environmental policies. Therefore, effectively intervening to advance shark conservation globally and foster more socially equitable policies and practices require multi-scalar interdisciplinary and dialectical analyses of social, economic, and policy dynamics.

GLOBAL-LOCAL SCALAR DIALECTICS

Global biodiversity conservation inevitably faces a problem of scale. Scale, as Sayre (2005) contended, is socially produced rather than an a priori given. "Scale is an attribute of how one observes something rather than the attribute observed" (Sayre 2005:280). Global biodiversity conservation in fisheries, therefore, requires attention to the social dimensions of scale. Campling and Havice (2018) illustrated that fisheries systems over the last century are not bound by national waters but instead bleed into distant waters and international markets. Regarding global shark fin production and consumption, for instance, questions of scale intersect at numerous levels: national and state policies, international and local fisheries practices, and the actions of various local market actors, such as traders and consumers. Scholars have illustrated how small-scale fisheries experience environmental degradation propelled by global demand (Frawley et al. 2019). Attention to multi-scalar processes and interactions across scale is required to address crises of biodiversity loss.

Contrasting approaches to the global scale portray a variety of conceptual frameworks. Research on shark conservation has detailed the global scale of ocean sanctuaries through multi-sited dive observations across national contexts (Ward-Paige and Worm 2017). In this rendering, the global scale is a collection of spatial containers bounded by nation-states, not a set of interactions or processes. This scalar approach has been critiqued as simply considering the global to be the sum of national parts (Downing et. al. 2021). Nation-based imaginaries of the global are common, popularized in part through work on global economic relations. Friedman’s (2000) conceptualization of the global as international economic connectivity bounded by nation-states, likewise, has been critiqued as inattentive to localized differentiation within and between states and contexts (Cox 2008). Research on social-ecological relations, in contrast, has brought attention to conceptual frameworks that integrate the global and local in holistic systems.

Social-ecological systems research has produced conceptual frameworks to examine multi-scalar relationships. Cash et al. (2006) argued that the interplay within institutions, across multiple levels, was crucial to defining cross-scalar and cross-level dynamics. Solving complex social-ecological problems, the authors contended, requires cross-level knowledge co-production, mediation, and negotiation to overcome localized knowledge gaps surrounding multi-scalar dynamics, processes, and interactions. In a similar vein, Liu et al. (2013), advocated for attention to feedbacks between places and processes through a "telecoupling" framework, which refers to environmental and socioeconomic interactions across distance. Emerging from systems thinking, the telecoupling framework brings attention to socio-ecologically coupled flows, agents, causes, and effects to analyze component parts and their interrelationships. Dialectical critiques of early social-ecological systems theories hold that they tend toward reductionist assessments of the component parts that constitute a holistic system; component parts and systems are viewed as relatively static; and there is a general neglect of the historically contingent contradictions internal to social-ecological relationality (Lewontin and Levins 2007). "The way in which a problem is framed, the selection of the system and subsystem, is prior to systems theory but crucial to dialectics. A dialectical approach recognizes that the ‘system’ is an intellectual construct designed to elucidate some aspects of reality but necessarily ignoring and even distorting others" (Lewontin and Levins 2007:122).

We advance a dialectical conceptualization of global-local processes and socioeconomic relations drawing from a tradition of dialectical scientific reasoning (Lewis and Lewontin 1985) and analyses of socio-environmental issues in the geographical tradition (Marston 2000, Hart 2002, Watts 2013). Dialectical approaches to socio-natural complexity emphasize the dynamic and co-determinate character of organisms and environment, relationships and processes, and society and nature. Dialectical analyses revolve around processes, flows, and relations that collectively constitute a system. But, in contrast to earlier social-ecological systems approaches, noted above, dialectical reasoning emphasizes historical contingency, contradictions and their effects, and social relations of power and difference. Dialectical approaches to social-ecological relations aim to elucidate "the connection of that which, at first appears to be without connection, the connection at the point of the origin of the phenomena, which appears as disparate in the result" (Haug 2005:246).

Applying a dialectical framework to relationships between shark fin production and consumption to reflect on global biodiversity loss entails bringing attention to parts and relations within holistic systems. It entails viewing relationships and processes across multiple sites and dimensions, i.e., social, political, economic, and ecological, as bounded internal relationships emergent from historically contingent contradictions. In this regard, recent advances in social-ecological systems analyses offer productive insights. For instance, epistemological choices have been identified as necessary to defining the boundaries of a given coupled social-ecological system and the relationships that matter to specific processes and their effects (Friis and Nielson 2017, Meyfroidt 2019). Setting epistemic boundaries enables analysis that incorporates how different actors and processes meditate flows and interactions "independent of their ‘position’ in geographical spaces" thereby developing an understanding of "the uneven distribution of both direct and indirect positive and negative effects" (Friis and Nielson 2017:3). Further, in response to critiques of early systems analyses being relatively static and reductionist, scholars have begun accounting for non-linear relational dynamics of social-ecological systems. Specifically, scholars have posited operating principles of complex adaptive systems, such as context and radical openness (Preiser et. al. 2018). In this regard, context is not a passive backdrop to a given system, but rather an active agent shaping relationships across geographical locations that are not isolated or closed off from one another.

Dialectical analyses are crucial to elucidating the contexts and radical openness that matter by identifying historical contingencies and contradictions that lend structure to particular processes and relations. Examining such contingencies and contradictions unearths social-ecologic dynamics and their effects within an ever-changing social-ecological structure. A dialectical approach holds processes and outcomes, such as the production and consumption of shark fins across distant spaces of the earth, as internally related and constantly shifting according to historically contingent contradictions that reconstitute fluctuating social-ecological structures.

Global processes of shark fin production bear not only on fishers and traders, but also on classed, gendered, and intergenerational dynamics of consumption. Consumption of shark fins, as the results show, is undergirded by expressions of social difference and social distinction. Bourdieu (1984) argued that the power to define “taste” is intimately bound up with social class and forms of symbolic distinction. He identifies a complex set of interrelated forms of capital, i.e., economic, cultural, and social, through which taste emerges as a mode of distinguishing between social groups. Individuals that attain certain levels of economic capital and power can acquire objects with cultural capital that enhance social capital. Shark fin, in the social context of Hong Kong, is a prime example of a commodity with a high level of cultural capital, what Bourdieu would call an "instrument" of "symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought or possessed" (Bourdieu 1984:488). The findings indicate that shark fins operate as an historically contingent form of cultural capital that articulates across forms of classed, gendered, and generational difference.

These forms of cultural capital dialectically affect global production and trade. Fisheries spanning five continents contribute shark fins to the Hong Kong market. International efforts to produce fins emerge in relation to demand and Hong Kong’s entrepôt functionality. Artisanal fishers in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic are dialectically interrelated with global processes of shark defaunation that resulted in shark fin retail bans. Shark fin retail bans have reshaped artisanal fishers’ practices and the local political economy of shark fisheries. A global-local dialectical framework attentive to social, political, and economic dynamics of shark fins anchors our methods and analysis.

METHODS

We employed an interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach crossing the social and natural sciences. A literature review was conducted that identified factors relevant to the history of shark fin production and consumption. One author analyzed trade data from the Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department to determine the leading countries contributing shark fins to the Hong Kong market from 2013-2019, recent years for which there were available data at the time of collection. Statistical data were gathered with the support of Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department and Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department in 2020^[1]. Two authors, one fluent in Cantonese and the other speaking both Mandarin and English, used snowball sampling, an interactive participatory technique as described by Noy (2008), to conduct semi-structured interviews with shark fin retailers and consumers in Hong Kong (Appendix 5). Twenty-three interviews in Hong Kong with traders and consumers focused on socioeconomic dynamics of shark fin valuation. They were conducted in dried seafood retail shops and markets from June to August in 2021 and January to February in 2023. In the Mid-Atlantic state of New Jersey, one author conducted semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, as detailed by Hennink (2013), with artisanal fishers on the effects of the 2021 state-wide shark fin retail ban on fishing practices and local economies (Appendix 6). Altogether this entailed 14 interviews and 2 focus groups with 4 and 6 participants, respectively. Additionally, one author corresponded with local fish and game agencies on shark fin policy and analyzed relevant policy documents. Interview data were manually coded and analyzed inductively to identify key themes and relationships. Inductive reasoning is a post-positivist mode of analysis that identifies empirical regularities between phenomena, key relationships, and their possible causes and effects (Meyfroidt 2019). These interviews and correspondences were conducted from June to December of 2021 and supplemented with data from market reports.

We examined local knowledge and capacity of NJ artisanal fishers to distinguish local shark species by comparing self-reported species identification with results from mitochondrial DNA barcoding tests of biological samples collected post-landing. This comparison was conducted on 47 shark fins, identified as belonging to 6 different species, collected by licensed fishers from August to November 2021 within 20 miles of Barnegat Light, NJ. Tissue samples from each individual were frozen soon after landing and transferred to the laboratory. DNA was extracted from each sample with magnetic beads, following the protocol described by Kučka and Chan (2022), with overnight tissue lysis at 60°C. We targeted the full ~650 bp barcoding region of the mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase Subunit I gene (COI) with either the LCO1490 and HCO2198 primers developed by Folmer et al. (1994) or the C_FishF1t1-C_FishR1t1 primer cocktail described by Ivanova et al. (2007). Amplification was carried out in 20 μl reactions containing 2 μl DNA extract, 0.2 μM each primer, 10 μl 2x Qiagen Multiplex PCR Master Mix, and water. For reactions with the Folmer primers, cycling conditions included an initial denaturation at 95°C for 3 minutes, followed by 40 cycles of 95°C for 1 minute, 46°C for 30s, and 72°C for 1 minute, and a final extension for 5 minutes at 72°C. For the Ivanova primer cocktail, we used 35 cycles and an annealing temperature of 55°C. Amplification success was confirmed by visualizing the PCR products on agarose gels. Successful amplicons were cleaned with Exo-Sap-IT (Thermo Fisher Scientific) following the manufacturer’s instructions and were Sanger sequenced in one direction with the HCO2198 primer for Folmer amplicons and an M13F primer for the Ivanova amplicons at the Cornell Institute of Biotechnology.

The chromatograms for the resulting sequence data were visually inspected, and noisy sequence at the ends was trimmed off. To generate a reference data set, we first compiled a list of shark species found in the Northeast Atlantic (total of 56) based on the inventory by Castro (2011) and encounter records from NOAA surveys (H. Cook, personal communication; Appendix 1). We then randomly selected two reference COI sequences for each species from the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) public database (Appendix 3). We queried each of our sequences (Appendix 4) against this reference database using the web-based Nucleotide Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLASTn) with default parameter settings (not adjusted for short input sequences). Almost all our sequences matched a single species from our reference database with > 98.5% sequence similarity and showed a much poorer match (> 2.5% lower sequence similarity) to the second-closest species, so we assigned species based on the unambiguous top hits (Appendix 2).

RESULTS

Hong Kong markets and Mid-Atlantic fisheries in historical context

Hong Kong is the world’s leading shark fin trading entrepôt, routinely cycling half of the global trade. Hong Kong emerged as a global entrepôt, in part, because of its history forged between empires and capital. During British colonization, Hong Kong became a trade entrepôt with no import-export taxes, a feature retained after 1997 independence from Britain and further integration with mainland China from 2020 onward. This is significant for the shark fin trade because Hong Kong functions as a trade entrepôt. Many fins are imported only to be exported elsewhere. It is common, however, across media, scholarship, and conservation discourse to assert quintessential, historically timeless Asian taste for so-called "wild" animal commodities, such as shark fin. The discourse of "four treasures of the sea," including shark fins, abalone, sea cucumber, and fish maw, for example, is well known. Chief among these cultural explanations for "wild tastes" (yewei) is the notion that certain foods can supplement (bufa) human health, including organ functionality, and specific parts of the human body (Anderson 1988, Simoon 1991, Newman 2004). Recent scholarship attests that many supposedly timeless forms of Chinese wildlife consumption are, instead, relatively recent phenomena linked to a burgeoning middle class, industrial methods of production, and international trade (Chee 2021, Rodenbiker 2023).

Although recipes for shark fin date back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279; Fabinyi 2012), in most dynastic periods, shark fin consumption was limited to elites. This historical feature continues to apply today. Consuming shark fins is predominantly an elite enterprise tethered to the projection of social status. Shark fin consumption, therefore, functions as a form of social distinction that expresses classed, gendered, and intergenerational differences. Shark fins have often been served in lavish banquets and weddings (Multiple interviews with consumers and retailers in Hong Kong 2021, 2023). As such, weddings and banquets have been key targets for intervention by conservation initiatives and state policy (Shea and To 2017). The Chinese State, for instance, banned shark fins at banquets in 2013. Although international efforts to mitigate consumption of shark fins are predominantly directed toward China and Hong Kong, the production of shark fins for the market extends far beyond.

In 2021, the Mid-Atlantic U.S. State of New Jersey enacted a state-wide shark fin retail ban in response to concerns of overconsumption in Asia, shark finning, and global defaunation. The state-wide shark fin retail ban, called NJ S2905, was approved in January 2020 and took effect on January 1, 2021 (New Jersey Senate 2020). The law states that no person shall sell, trade, distribute, or offer for sale any shark fin or any shark fin that has been separated before its lawful landing. The law does not apply to fins used for scientific purposes, such as those in this study, or to smooth (Mustelus canis) or spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias). Although spiny dogfish are listed as globally vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with reduced abundance in the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean (IUCN 2015), artisanal fishers report that they remain numerous. In contrast with the IUCN, NOAA supports the position that Atlantic dogfish are not overfished, although there may be a shortage of sexually mature females (NOAA 2019). Despite these discrepancies, shark fishing continues in NJ fisheries with the dogfish catch historically peaking in November (Fisher 1, 3, and 6, NJ, 2021). In addition, other species such as spinners (Carcharhinus brevipinna), scalloped hammerheads (Sphyrna lewini), makos (Isurus oxyrinchus), blacktip (Carcharhinus limbatus), sandbars (Carcharhinus plumbeus), sharpnose (Rhizoprionodon terraenovae), and thresher (Alopias vulpinus) can be caught locally. The number of sharks caught through long-line commercial fishing has been estimated to be less than recreational shark fishing (Gallagher et. al 2017).

In the decades preceding the shark fin retail ban, NJ artisanal fishers sold all parts of the sharks they caught. The meat was exported to England, France, Spain, and Germany for fish and chips, often called “rock salmon” on European menus. New Jersey historically catches and supplies dogfish for the global market. Most prominently, the U.K. leads the world in dogfish consumption (Hobbs et. al. 2019). Shark belly flaps were used in Germany for smoked jerky. The head and internal organs were used in the U.S. for pig feed. Vitamins and supplements were made from shark cartilage. The fins, however, were largely exported to East and Southeast Asia via Hong Kong (Fisher 1, 2, 5, NJ, July 2021).

New Jersey Fish and Game opposed the ban stating that shark fins "are not a New Jersey problem; they are a global problem" (personal communication, March 2021). New Jersey Fish and Game representatives repeatedly noted that although there is a precedent of landing sharks and selling fins, there is no precedence for shark finning in NJ’s highly regulated coastal waters. Instead, shark finning was something associated with "Asian" fishing practices and underregulated fisheries (personal communication, March 2021). New Jersey Fish and Wildlife representatives stated that shark fins are "more of a global issue and, if anything, the regulation just confused matters and made life more difficult for legitimate commercial fishermen in New Jersey. Recent regulations created to protect sharks actually hurt U.S. fishermen without improving shark conservation" (personal communication, March 2021). Corroborating this claim, NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator, Chris Oliver (2020), released a public statement against shark fin retail bans, contending that totalizing bans would not improve conservation in U.S. fisheries, which are among the most sustainably managed globally. Additionally, NJ local seafood associations and NOAA opposed the retail ban, as did the Garden State Seafood Association (personal communication, July 2021). Despite concerted opposition, NJ S2905 took effect in 2021 reorienting the political economy of sharks and spurring the practice of "reverse shark finning."

"Reverse shark finning"

Artisanal fishers, in interviews and focus group discussions, describe how the retail ban altered how they process shark catches. Fishers remove and discard fins post-landing, a process they refer to as "reverse shark finning," which results in biological waste and economic losses (Fisher 1, 3, 5, 6, NJ July 2021; Fisher 1, 4, 6 8, 9, 12, NJ, November 2021). This reflects a dialectical contradiction wherein concerns over global defaunation, shark finning, and overconsumption in Asia have affected local environmental policy and practice.

Instead of de-finning sharks and selling the fins on the market as they have done historically, fishers are required to de-fin sharks post-landing and discard the fins. Since NJ S2905 began, fishers began to throw the fins into the garbage or simply back into the ocean from the dock. As one fisher stated:

We are all scared to death about getting in trouble. So, it is best to throw them out before you get in a fight with the game warden... The smoothies [smooth dogfish], we just toss them in the garbage... The law still states that you have to bring the shark in whole. So, we don’t dare take the fins off before landing. But now it’s like we are reverse shark finning. We are just wasting the fins. (Fisher 1, NJ, July 2021).

Artisanal fishers’ concerns revolve around the production of biological waste and the economic losses from not selling fins, and a broader uncertainty, shared by fishers and game wardens, about the retail ban.

The game wardens come in and say that you don’t have to throw the fins away. You’ just can’t sell them on the retail market. Well, what is the ‘retail’ market? The game wardens don’t even know. They don’t know what ‘retail’ means (Fisher 2, NJ, June 2021).

An NJ game warden noted that fishers could legally obtain and keep the fins but clarified that they cannot sell them or gift them to others (personal communication, August 2021). Before the ban, NJ fisheries supplied fins for the Hong Kong market through U.S. export retailers.

Since the ban took effect, the most valuable parts of the shark, the fins, are removed and discarded resulting in economic loss for NJ artisanal fisheries. This economic loss is dialectically connected to regulatory policies justified in relation to global processes of defaunation. Despite the economic losses, the total number of sharks caught by artisanal fisheries remains the same as before the retail band (Multiple interviews with Fishers, NJ, July, August, and November 2021). This suggests low efficacy of a totalizing shark fin retail ban for reducing local catches. From the standpoint of artisanal fishers, the retail ban has resulted in detrimental economic effects and additional labor hardships in processing shark catches. A fisher, discussing the shark fin retail ban stated:

Shark fisheries used to be really great for us. But now they are not that great anymore... If I were able to sell the fins maybe I would get 1.75$US or 2.00$US per pound - and that is a good price - so it sucks [pause]. You know we need those fins. (Fisher 3, NJ, July 2021)

Sharks with the most desirable characteristics found in NJ waters are hammerheads, sandbars, and spinners. These species also fetch the highest prices on the market. An artisanal fisher described the economic losses in terms of a percentage of profits lost from a given catch.

If we caught 4,000 pounds of [shark] meat, at the best of it, we probably got 60 cents for it [the meat per pound]. But the fins, if you were catching nice sandbars, most of them would be eight feet so you would be averaging north of 20 bucks a pound for fins. So, you’re talking a lot of times the fins would be worth almost 4,000 dollars, you know, at best 2,400 worth of meat. So, the fins were 60% or better of the income. So now that is a 60% loss... We have just been whittled down by these kinds of regulations. It’s death by a thousand cuts. (Fisher 6, NJ, November 2021)

Artisanal fishers characterized the retail ban as one among many regulatory apparatuses that bring about economic losses or in their commonly used expression "death by a thousand cuts." According to local fishers, shark fins are valued for their size, morphological characteristics, and their consistency when rehydrated. New Jersey fishers refer to the consistency as “noodles” because rehydrated cartilage appears like noodles (Fisher 1, NJ, August 2021). Although NJ artisanal fishers have historically contributed to the Hong Kong market, their contributions are relatively limited when compared to the global production of shark fins.

Global shark fin production and circulation through Hong Kong

We draw on statistical data to highlight global shark fin production and circulation through Hong Kong markets from 2013-2019, the most recent years for which there were available data at the time of collection. Trade statistics reveal three facets of global trade and circulation through Hong Kong. Figure 1 reveals that the top sources contributing shark fins to Hong Kong span five continents including Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and South America. Second, trade statistics, highlighted in Figure 2, reveal that Hong Kong is a dynamic trade entrepôt not only importing shark fins for domestic consumption, but also exporting fins to supply markets elsewhere. Third, statistics highlighted in Figure 3 reveal inter-regional trade of shark fins within East Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent in Canada and the United States.

Previous studies identified that between 1998 and 2013, the top volumes of shark fins to Hong Kong were supplied by Spain, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates (Shea and To 2017). Picking up where this study leaves off in 2013, Figure 1 illustrates Hong Kong’s sources for shark fins continue to span the globe. Spain, until 2015, was the leading supplier of shark fins to the Hong Kong market. Spain has the largest number of long liners in the EU fisheries arsenal, and they routinely fish for sharks in international waters. Shark fin landings, however, have been decreasing due to local regulations on shark fishing. For instance, the EU has been limiting the catch of specific species, such as makos since 2021 (Sims et al. 2021). Taiwan was the leading supplier in 2015 and 2016. From 2018, Singapore became the leading shark fin supplier. Other leading importers include Senegal, Taiwan, Indonesia, Peru, and Mexico. The decrease in imports from 5,746,460 kg in 2014 to 2,805,422 kg in 2015 is in part due to effective anti-shark consumption campaigns in Hong Kong, which began during the early 2010s (Consumer 1, 2, Hong Kong, June 2021; Retailer 1, 4, 8, 10, 15, Hong Kong, February 2023). The late 2010s, however, saw a resurgence of shark fin imports with a peak of 4,979,983 kg in 2017.

Although Hong Kong leads the world in shark fin imports, they also export a significant number of fins. Figure 2 shows that Hong Kong routinely exports roughly two-fifths of annual imports. The practice of exporting fins imported from elsewhere, reflected in Figure 2, was corroborated by local conservation officials at Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD 1, 2, Hong Kong, February 2023). Annual fluctuations are the result of shifts in supply and demand in partner countries. Nonetheless, the figure illustrates the volumes and inter-regional relations embedded in Hong Kong’s entrepôt functionality. These figures reveal a constantly fluctuating global trade in shark fins. The absence of import and export taxes bolsters Hong Kong’s advantage as a trading intermediary between countries. Hong Kong can hold fins on the market until shifts in price or demand make export economically viable. As visible in Figure 3, the bulk of exports go to subregional markets within Southeast and East Asia. Vietnam is Hong Kong’s leading export destination, followed by mainland China, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Thailand. The U.S. and Canada receive fewer than 20,000 kg of shark fins annually, making them the lowest export destinations within Hong Kong’s top trading partner countries.

Contrary to the predominant focus on consumers within conservation groups, the global production of shark fins implicates fisheries across the world in biodiversity loss. Fisheries that supply Hong Kong span the globe. Viewing the shark fin trade through global-local scalar dynamisms points to the need for participating countries to consider their contribution to defaunation in relation to national regulations. Taking stock of international and regional contributions to the market illustrates the role of Hong Kong as an entrepôt in a global network. Its function as a trade entrepôt requires international participation. Although subregional geographies of trade play key roles in the circulation of shark fins, consumption cannot be reduced to historically timeless cultural practices. On the contrary, classed, gendered, and intergenerational dynamics undergird shark fin consumption.

Classed, gendered, and intergenerational dynamics of shark fin consumption

Contrary to popular discourse of timeless cultural practices of consuming shark fins, interviews in Hong Kong and supplementary data indicate classed, gendered, and intergenerational dynamics underly shark fin consumption. Shark fins are high-price commodities that function as instruments of symbolic wealth. In the language of Bourdieu (1984), shark fins are desirable in the pursuit of social distinction.

Interviewees claimed that shark fin consumption signifies class status and that most often shark fins are served at banquets and weddings in prestigious hotels (Consumer 1, 2, Hong Kong, July 2021; Retailers 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, Hong Kong, February 2023). Shark fins served at wedding banquets are highly visible displays of cultural capital that strengthen the social capital of those who purchase the fins. Social capital, for Bourdieu (1984), refers to the strengthening of a durable network of people and mutual acquaintances who recognize the cultural capital and credentialed distinction of the purchaser of shark fins, in the case of wedding banquets those being married and their families. As a Hong Kong consumer remarked during an interview, "there is a relation between shark fins, seafood, and wealth or class because people show off to others by serving them these high-value items" (Consumer 3, Hong Kong, July 2021). Claims that class matters were nearly universal in interviews with Hong Kong retailers and consumers.

The role of social status is further corroborated by written accounts on shark fin consumption. In an account about the generational differences in consuming shark fin soup, for instance, the author describes shark fin as intimately linked to generational notions of economic success. The author reflects:

Much of my grandfather’s life was built around that [shark fin] soup, built around the idea that he could show the world and himself that he’d finally made it, that he could literally feed his family his success... The cultural import of the dish is as much about status as anything else (Lam 2011).

Accounts, such as this, highlight shark fin consumption as a gastronomical expression of class difference and upward socioeconomic mobility, particularly for those of older generations.

Within this context, interviewees claimed that there is a generational divide in shark fin consumption.

For now, it is probably only the older generation who would cook or buy shark fins. The younger generation, like me, does not really know how to cook them and how to buy them. (Consumer 2, Hong Kong, July 2021).

Another interviewee claimed:

There is a generational divide in consuming shark fins... it is something that the younger generation would avoid because it will take up a lot of time to prepare and cook. The trend now in Hong Kong would be eating something fast and cheap... Shark fins are slow and expensive. The younger generation is following a different trend. (Consumer 4, Hong Kong, August 2021).

Interviewees stressed there is a generational shift underway in consuming shark fins. Wherein older consumers maintain strong associations with shark fins and social distinction, younger generations do not necessarily value shark fin consumption in the same way.

Shark fin consumption articulates not only with class and age, but also with gender. Historically, shark fin consumption has been a masculinist endeavor. Fins were historically reserved for the emperor and later exclusively consumed as part of high-class cuisine (Fabinyi 2012). Gendered social imaginaries continue to motivate consumption. Interviewees stated that the consumption of shark fins supplements (buyang) functions within the body and health more generally (Retailer 1, 7, 10, 12, Hong Kong, February 2023). Interviewees associated shark fin consumption with health, skin elasticity for women, and enhanced virility in men (Retailer 1, 7, 10, 12, Hong Kong, February 2023). Moreover, the association of shark fin with health benefits and virility is corroborated by other studies (Vannuccini 1999, Teo 2015). Associations of shark fin consumption with supplementing bodily qualities index forms of gendered differentiation that dialectically propel shark fin production globally, including in coastal New Jersey.

Local fishers’ knowledge and participation in sustainable management

Artisanal NJ fishers, in interviews and focus group discussions, did not oppose fisheries regulations. Instead, they discussed the importance of incorporating their knowledge and practices into fisheries management for greater ecological sustainability.

Fisher 4:

As fishermen, as a whole, we don’t want to catch the last fish. We are into sustainability. We want to see sustainability because there is no future in unsustainable fishing for us. We are making our living from fishing. We want to continue to be able to fish. We don’t want to go out there and catch every fish in the ocean and have no living.

Fisher 3:

That is how we are portrayed.

Fisher 4:

So we want to see fishing regulated because you don’t want to catch every fish in the ocean and get paid shit money for it. We would rather fish sustainably, get paid good money for a quality product and keep on keeping on... We want to be here for the long run. And, unfortunately, it looks like the end of the road for that. To have real sustainable fishing, you have to work with fisheries in places where fishermen have been for a long time. (NJ, November 2021)

This highlights artisanal fishers’ support for incorporating their knowledge and experience to work toward more sustainable fisheries management.

Artisanal fishers felt that their local knowledge and experience were not being included because of widespread associations of shark fins with overconsumption and shark finning. A fisher, in this regard, framed shark finning as predominantly carried out by Chinese fisheries.

The guys who are fishing responsibly are taking it on the chin. These industrial scale Chinese fisheries are bad you know... We get the blame for what China is doing. We are victims of poor practices in other countries, and we just get lumped in as ‘one of them guys.’ (Fisher 3, NJ, August 2021)

This quote draws attention to how orientalizing discourses surrounding shark finning bear on perceptions of U.S. fisheries. Global orientalist discourses have come to shape U.S. state fisheries policies, like NJ S2905, and national-level policies that ban shark fin retail, which were approved in December 2022. On a national level, however, removing shark fins at sea and discarding the carcass has been banned in U.S. waters since 2000. There have been no reports of Mid-Atlantic fishers finning sharks over the last several decades. The perception of global threat to shark populations, nonetheless, has resulted in statewide retail bans with substantive effects on artisanal fisheries without evaluating how local knowledge could be used in conservation efforts.

Artisanal NJ fishers, in response, participated in our comparative study wherein the authors tested their ability to identify shark species they caught at sea. From July-November 2021, fishers self-reported visual species identifications of sharks caught while gillnetting. Biological samples from fins were collected from fins discarded through reverse shark finning. Comparing the self-reported species identifications with results from DNA barcoding supports the claim that artisanal fishers’ knowledge is sufficient to identify shark species at sea with high accuracy.

We obtained at least 651 bp of COI sequence for each of our 47 samples and for all but 1 sample, the species identification determined with DNA barcoding matched the visual species assignment by fishers (Appendix 2). The one mismatch occurred for a sample that the fisher had identified as a spiny dogfish, but the DNA barcoding data (with multiple independently generated DNA sequences from both the Folmer and Ivanova primer pairs) strongly suggested it was a spinner shark (Appendix 2). Given that these two shark species look very different, this mismatch could have resulted from an error in data recording or sample mislabeling rather than misclassification to the wrong species based on visual examination. But either way, data suggest that in at least 46 out of 47 cases, artisanal fishers were able to correctly identify the harvested species (Table 1).

DISCUSSION

These findings point to the enduring disjuncture between global processes and local policies and practices with implications for environmental policies, biodiversity conservation, and global-local relations of production and consumption. First, there are implications for state- and national-level environmental policies regarding shark fisheries and shark fin trade regulation. Although the U.S. has had a federal ban on shark finning since 2000, U.S. congress passed a nation-wide shark fin retail ban in December 2022, called the Shark Fin Retail Elimination Act, which aims to effectively ban the sale of all shark fins within U.S. national territories. There is an exception in the bill for the sale of fins from some types of dogfish. These bans have been advanced, in part, due to perceptions of global biodiversity loss linked with overconsumption and shark finning (Duong 2021). Global concerns over biodiversity loss due to shark finning and overconsumption underly these national environmental policies. However, state-wide shark fin bans in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic have not resulted in a decrease in local shark catches in the artisanal sector. Moreover, state-wide bans have given rise to reverse shark finning, a practice that produces biological waste and economic loss without affecting regional shark catch numbers. Our findings, therefore, call for renewed attention to how anxieties around Asian consumption, global fishing practices, and biodiversity loss are shaping local and national policy frameworks, which appear to be ineffective in improving biodiversity conservation.

In the context of the U.S., there is widespread support for totalizing shark fin retail bans despite a growing number of studies that challenge the empirical grounds upon which such policies are made and the efficacy of bans (Shiffman and Hueter 2017, Heuter and Shiffman 2019, Porcher et. al. 2019). New Jersey’s state-wide ban, as the results indicate, didn’t reduce shark catches within the artisanal fishing sector. The ban did, however, precipitate economic losses. The economic effects of totalizing bans are not currently prioritized in state- and national-level policies. A ban that targets specific species and incorporates local fishers’ knowledge and practices, conversely, could address biodiversity conservation within U.S. coastal waters while mitigating economic losses. In addition, the policy focus on shark fin retail overlooks the ways that international trade through U.S. port cities facilitates the global market. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that between 591 to 701 metric tons of shark fins passed through U.S. port cities over a 7-year period from 2010-2017 (NRDC 2019) en route to Hong Kong and South China’s cities. Fins that transit through the U.S. often come from Latin American countries including Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama, and Costa Rica. The role of U.S. port infrastructures in the global shark fin trade receives comparatively little attention. More robust port management is key to localized policies that support global biodiversity conservation.

Furthermore, our findings point to the need to reorient discourses and regulatory practices with a dialectical understanding of the multi-scalar dynamics surrounding shark fin production and consumption. The notion of historically timeless Asian consumption of shark fins, common in conservation discourse, obfuscates specific social dynamics underlying shark fin consumption, specifically classed, gendered, and generational dynamics. Public outreach campaigns that directly engage elite consumers and generational interests would more accurately represent social dynamisms fueling demand for shark fins and may prove more effective in reducing consumption. These localized social dynamics articulate dialectically with international fisheries to constitute a global system of shark fin production and consumption. Because the production of shark fins to supply Hong Kong’s market is global in character, coming from five continents, locally specific environmental policies are key to regulating shark fishing. A Hong Kong policy to import solely from countries with regulatory mechanisms to support sustainable fishing, mitigate overfishing, and shark finning locally would incentivize countries to implement more robust regulatory measures.

CONCLUSION

Effective interventions to advance shark conservation globally and foster more socially equitable policies and practices require multi-scalar interdisciplinary and dialectical analyses of social, economic, and policy dynamics. Analyzing global-local relationships and dynamics that constitute social-ecological systems are crucial for effective biodiversity conservation. We examined relationships between fisheries in NJ, regional policies, and social dynamics of consumption in Hong Kong. In this case, more targeted efforts that consider socioeconomic dynamics are needed to affect consumption, while more holistic policies that investigate actual impacts rather than blanket bans may be more effective on the production side. The disjuncture between local practices, processes, and policies are not isolated to Hong Kong and the Mid-Atlantic, however. The widespread association of shark fin consumption with timeless Asian tastes obfuscates key social dynamics that drive of consumption, such as classed, gendered, and intergenerational social dynamics, which bear on production the world over. Within the dialectical relationships between production and consumption of shark fins, or other nature-based commodities for that matter, there are myriad opportunities for interventions. Further studies that examine the global-local scalar dynamics of production and consumption in a dialectical register are required to shape interventions that more fully account for social-ecological relationships across geographical locations.

^[1]Customs and excise statistical data can be found at https://www.customs.gov.hk/en/statistics/index.html.

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