Votes for Sale at UN-linked Shark-protection Group
Donald Frazier, Contributor
5/22/2012
Votes for Sale at UN-linked Shark-protection Group - Forbes
HONG KONGConfronted with a rising tide of bans and boycotts, the outfits that sell shark fin are fighting back just this week, with a high-profile onslaught of ads in the industrys epicenter that says sharks arent endangered, and charges that Western cultural supremacy lies behind the global campaign to shun this unlikely delicacy.
The protests, according to the leading trade group for shark products, are intended to incite the public to discriminate against our own eating culture. It claims Western conservation groups use the shark issue as a fund-raising gimmick. We now make a vow to voice out and unveil those lies.
But shark-finning interests fight this battle mainly behind closed doors. They pack the UN-endorsed group thats supposed to protect sharks with friends consultants who work for them, government officials who are supposed to promote their home industries, lobbyists who front shady educational groups, and even outright employees.
Just can't wait to get over the wedding part, so we can finally deplete the oceans' biodiversity.
The result: feeble, dilatory, and otherwise ineffective oversight of a business that according to research oceanologists takes as many as 73 million sharks a year, and damages ecosystems that support fisheries feeding hundreds of millions. According to the Pew Environment Group, shark populations have declined from 70 to 80 percent over the last 50 years, and 30 percent of species are now endangered including the hammerhead, whose fin is especially prized for soup.
Blame prosperity. Many of the worlds Chinese crave the social status they get for offering shark fin soup at banquets and weddings. Now more and more of them can afford it, even at prices exceeding $100 per bowl, and consumption has gone up dramatically over the last two decades,
But overfishing can have devastating consequences for ocean life. And shark-finning itself often slicing the fin from a still-living shark and tossing it back into the ocean to drown, making room for more of the highly-profitable finsarouses widespread revulsion. A number of cities and states in North America have passed laws against serving shark fin, and a number of top Hong Kong restaurants and hotels have followed suit.
The UN treaty is supposed to protect animals from becoming threatened by international trade, but pro-trade lobbyists have managed to rally the one-third of the vote needed to veto any proposal, according to Peter Knights, executive director of the global anti-smuggling NGO, WildAid, referring to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. Such vetoes cast in secret balloting kept the hammerhead off the list at a CITES meeting in Doha, Qatar in 2010.
In a more recent example, an event in Singapore, an influential member of the CITES shark group described the campaign against shark finning as a Western attack on Chinese culture. Dr. Giam Choo-Hoo claimed most sharks are caught by small-scale subsistence fishermen, most shark fin is a product of accidental catches, and sharks dont need protection anyway. Everything he said in this forum flies in the face of a vast consensus of scientific data, and is extensively disproven by dozens of research organizations and academic institutions.
But Dr. Giams impartiality is in question. According to the Washington Post, he introduces himself as a representative of the shark fin industry. He advises leaders of the trade group, the Marine Products Association (which just recently took the words Shark Fin off its name), and he vigorously slaps down measures to protect sharks at CITES meetings around the world, as described in a police investigators report endorsed by Sea Shepherd, the Seattle-based conservation group.
Hes not even a shark expert his specialty is crocodiles, and he works for companies that make them into luxury handbags. But he does take the shark fin issue seriously. He explains that because shark fin soup is the number one most prestigious thing to serve at a big event in China, Chinese people do not want it banned, and he campaigns avidly for that result.
Others wonder why the 78-year-old veterinarian has a public forum in the first place. Only here where the industry is strong and the press is weak can you characterize such a biased charade as an impartial debate, Knights said.
Episodes like this cast a light on the inner workings of the UN-chartered CITES shark group. It is quite informal, explained Juan-Carlos Vasquez, communications head of the Geneva-based organization. Its members are supposed to have broad expertise, according to Susan Lieberman, deputy director for international policy for the Pew Environment Group. But taking part calls for a mere show of hands and the people who turn up are often bankrolled by the industry, or are paid to promote it.
This results in some odd decisions. For example, species hunted for their fins such as the long-fin mako, the porbeagle, and the thresher have declined precipitously over the last decade. But CITES lists only a few species as endangered: the basking, the great white, and the whale shark. Industry advisers like Giam vote, veto, and lobby to keep most of the threatened sharks off the list. Then, citing the same list, they say only a few sharks are endangered a widely-dismissed conclusion.
But CITES does not require members to disclose personal financial interest in the matters they rule on another break with global NGO practice. (Vasquez says it is considering changes to this policy.) Nor does it require member countries to refrain from vote-trading that is, a rich nation granting commercial advantage to a poor nation in exchange for a CITES vote protecting its own fishing industry.
The U.S. government has outlawed shark finning, and Canada is considering a ban on importing shark fin. But these measures will hardly make a dent in the global shark fin trade, where North America accounts for a mere three percent.
Meanwhile, overfishing for shark continues to alter the ecological balance of ocean fisheries in dramatic ways. Without a predator at the top of the food chain, surviving carnivorous fish and rays can wipe out commercially-valuable fish and scallops, and have already done so in many places. This takes a long time to reverse: sharks bear their young live, not many of them, and do it slowly.
