Demon Fish (35 page)

Almost no ocean-wide international shark catch limits exist. The EU has set some restrictions on a handful of species in the North Sea, but these limits regularly exceed the numbers marine scientists recommend. A few people who have grown up on the North Sea, like Struan Stevenson, know exactly what that kind of activity portends for the ocean.

Stevenson was born in Ballantrae, Scotland, and after serving as a councilman in South Ayrshire for nearly a quarter of a century, he now spends much of his time in Brussels, arguing over fish. He is a green Conservative in the mold of the British prime minister, David Cameron, who imbues his environmental crusades with a bit of anti-regulatory rhetoric. First elected to the European Parliament in 1999, Stevenson chaired its Fisheries Committee between 2002 and 2004 while simultaneously holding the title of Conservative front-bench spokesman on fisheries. He remains a senior member on the Fisheries Committee and considers sharks a key part of his policy portfolio.

During the course of his lifetime Stevenson has seen the collapse of small towns that used to thrive on the “Cod is God” philosophy. Cod once filled the North Sea to such an extent, he says, “you could almost walk from Scotland to Norway on their backs.” Whole communities sprang up in his country based on fishing cod, but “they’re virtual ghost towns now.” Now a new phrase is gaining popularity in Scotland, as fishermen struggle with dwindling catch quotas and diminishing fish stocks: “Sod the cod.” Having seen Scottish fishermen’s livelihoods dry up, Stevenson now adheres to a precautionary approach when it comes to regulating the seas. Roughly translated, it goes something like this: setting fishing limits now will stave off disaster later.

The Spaniards have yet to accept Stevenson’s reasoning, arguing that activists are overestimating the risks associated with overfishing and that nations have the right to explore the seas to satisfy consumer demand. Spanish fishing interests have already scaled back their operations and reduced the number of vessels they send out to sea, they point out, so further limits would damage their livelihoods.

Debating rules over shark finning in the European Parliament has a sort of comedic quality. During a debate in September 2006, when the Spanish delegation was pushing to increase the catch for blue sharks, they circulated an amendment that was only in Spanish. One of the Spanish delegates informed Stevenson it wasn’t fair to put strict limits on the fin-body ratio for blue sharks, because the species have “massive fins, great big fins.” (This isn’t true, anatomically speaking.)

Ultimately, Stevenson’s side won a small victory when the European Parliament rejected a recommendation from its Fisheries Committee to weaken the shark-finning rules even further. But the vote was not binding, since it’s the European Commission, not the parliament, that sets regulations.

Even as he has made a small bit of progress within parliament, the red-haired Scotsman received a powerful reminder of the market forces driving the shark fin trade when he went to China on an official delegation trip in 2006. At every official dinner, he recalls, the menu included “shark’s fin soup, and shark’s fin this and shark’s fin that … It was salty and stringy. It was like thin string, like flat noodles.”

Even when Stevenson makes modest strides in Europe, he is faced with the reality that as long as Chinese consumers demand shark’s fin soup for every important occasion, sharks are headed off the precipice. It’s somewhat akin to the debate Americans and Europeans engage in when discussing what needs to be done in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming: even if the EU and the United States impose strict limits, climate change will accelerate as long as the Chinese build a power plant a week to expand their manufacturing base. Worldwide environmental problems require global solutions, which presents a formidable political and diplomatic challenge. Otherwise, the sharks that escape a European fisherman’s nets will simply be trapped by one in Asia.

Armando Astudillo winces a lot when discussing sharks; he is a true European bureaucrat, and a diplomat, and he doesn’t like discussing topics that are, in his word, “painful.” (This word comes up several times in our conversation.) Moreover, any fisheries discussion constitutes a political minefield for him as a Spaniard.

Astudillo, who used to oversee the EU’s fishing fleets before being promoted to head its environment and health unit, is more than willing to acknowledge the EU has not followed up on some of its conservation pledges. “At the end of the day, we didn’t do much in terms of a plan of action,” he says, referring to the 1999 international UN pact. “We take sharks as a resource.”

From Astudillo’s perspective, managing sharks poses a political and diplomatic problem for Europeans, since it pits one region of the European Union against another. Nongovernmental organizations have raised “a red flag” about the animals’ predicament, which is beginning to resonate with the public. At the same time, agreeing to end shark finning by establishing a ratio of the fin catch to the overall haul “was particularly painful for the Spanish and Portuguese industry … The question was very difficult, very painful.” And it’s impossible not to feel the Spaniards’ pain, he reasons. “In this world, the European Union, decisions are made by a majority within the community. The Spanish fleet is the most important one, in terms of fishing in general.” And Spanish fishing interests, he adds, continue to complain that they cannot meet the EU’s rather laid-back standard when it comes to sharks.

It’s not that Astudillo questions the scientific basis for these restrictions: he questions the European Union’s political will. “If you are willing to protect sharks, what we know now is sufficient,” he says. “The problem is, it is not an easy task. Some people would say, ‘Why bother?’ ” And Europeans, he adds, like their shark. “You can go into any market in Brussels, you can find blue shark, mako shark,” he points out. “I have actually tried it. It’s not bad at all.”

Spending just a few minutes with Javier Garat Pérez, secretary-general of Confederación Española de Pesca, gives one a sense of the delicate task EU officials such as Astudillo face. With 1,450 fishing companies as members, the association Garat heads ranks as the biggest in Europe. These companies own a total of 1,650 vessels, of which 500 are large ships. Garat is not afraid to spend time with environmentalists: he regularly journeys to meetings like the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, which took place in Barcelona in October 2008. Garat preaches a message of moderation, saying that his members are just as interested in sustaining shark populations over the long term, because they have become concerned recently about the declining price of shark meat. “They say some species should be prohibited [from being caught]. We are ready to accept that,” he says of environmentalists. “What we hope to have is a future with shark fisheries. Now is when we want to take measures, to avoid worse measures in the future.”

But while Spanish fishermen are willing to make a few gestures toward conservation, such as reducing the size of their fleet through a buyout program and cutting back on the days the remaining vessels are at sea, Garat and his colleagues balk at the idea of landing sharks with their fins attached, or of tightening the fin-body weight ratio of shark landings to ensure that fishermen are not merely cutting off the animal’s fins before tossing it overboard.

“The profits will disappear. If we have to land the fins and body together, that will be the sentence of death to this fleet,” he says. “A long time ago, maybe twenty years ago, these long-liners were fishing only swordfish, and through bycatch they caught sharks. But the circumstances have changed over the last few years, and now we have a lot of vessels that are catching sharks. They are not bycatch; they are dedicated fisheries. Now they are very important to the economics of these companies.”

While the scientific evidence is mounting that shark populations cannot sustain the sort of fishing pressure they’re now under, translating these findings into policy remains challenging. Historically, fishing interests have never recognized the virtue of restraint, and instead relied on exploiting different species in succession in order to support their trade. Despite public pressure, the Spaniards are not ready to declare defeat when it comes to shark fishing.

Just over a year after Astudillo and I had a chance to talk, the EU published a “consultation document” aimed at finally producing an action plan for sharks. It contains many of the goals Fordham and her allies have been fighting for, including a fin-to-meat ratio of 5 percent of a shark’s dressed weight and a call to adhere to catch limits based on scientists’ recommendations. Now that the EU has released the document—which not only needs to be approved by EU officials but also must pass muster with Europe’s Council of Ministers and its parliament—fishing interests and environmentalists are hashing out the details in front of key decision makers.

While Sonja Fordham relocated to be in the fight, much of it takes place behind closed doors, where she can exercise little control over the outcome. “It’s so much more transparent in the U.S.,” she says. “At least you can go see the sausage being made.” In the United States, federal fisheries officials issue a public notice for a hearing and wait for anyone to show up. In Europe, policy makers hand out personal invitations.

Fordham finds herself making pilgrimages to hostile territory in Spain and France—provided she gets an invite. “I go and make a presentation. It’s not really welcome,” she acknowledges. “They sort of start out as gentlemen …” Fordham’s voice trails off. The fact that she usually ends up being pilloried goes unsaid.

But Fordham remains undaunted. She’s fine being seen as “the glaring American” at times, crusading for sharks. On occasion, she even passes as European, even if not as Mediterranean. “I got called a British woman the other day,” she recounts gleefully. In Fordham’s world, that’s progress. Rather than being considered a total outsider, she’s beginning to be accepted as a legitimate participant in the European debate over sharks.

In December 2008, the EU Council of Fisheries decided to ignore most of the shark catch recommendations made by the European Commission and independent scientists. Rather than abolishing the porbeagle and spurdog shark fisheries, the ministers just reduced the catch limits by 25 and 50 percent, respectively. France, which held the EU presidency at the time of the decision, engineered the outcome, because France operates Europe’s one remaining porbeagle fishery and was unwilling to shut it down. The vote marked a serious setback for Fordham, who had thought before the negotiations began that Europe was prepared to adopt strict fishing limits for the region’s most imperiled sharks. While the ministers agreed during the same meeting to fully protect angel sharks, a species that’s been decimated in Europe, Fordham remains convinced she and her allies aren’t making progress fast enough. “It really can be too late for sharks.”

But by April 2009, the EU Council of Fisheries appeared to be listening more closely to the concerns of Fordham and other environmentalists. It issued a document titled “Council Conclusions” endorsing a new EU Commission Shark Plan, which aims to broaden knowledge about sharks, ensure more sustainable catches, and reconcile the policies the EU espouses abroad and what it does at home. Even Spain is modifying its approach: in October 2009 it banned fishing eleven species of hammerhead and thresher sharks in its waters, making it the first EU member nation to do so. Spain doesn’t have a perfect record—its vessels continue to scour the high seas for commercially valuable sharks, and they’re still hauling illegally caught basking sharks onto land at Galicia and Asturias. But sharks’ allies are slowly making inroads in the halls of power.

Fordham had to pack up her bags in the summer of 2009—the funding for her post disappeared when the global recession hit, and she relocated to Washington to launch a new group, Shark Advocates International. Since then, shark conservation campaigns have only attracted a higher profile. Lesley Rochat runs the Save Our Seas Shark Centre in Kalk Bay, South Africa, within walking distance of where surfers brave the bay’s shark-infested waters. Rochat, a photographer and filmmaker with a university degree in the dramatic arts, has taken an unorthodox approach to shark conservation. Sometimes it amounts to a performance art routine; other times it’s more like a Madison Avenue advertising campaign. But Rochat is focused on winning over her audience, and more often than not she succeeds.

Rochat’s career trajectory changed one day when she was photographing an exhibit at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium, which featured a ragged-tooth shark named Maxine. Maxine had been caught in one of the shark nets that surround Durban but survived and was released, only to be caught again near Cape Town. The shark was scarred in the process, and Rochat, intrigued by the back-story, launched a fund-raising campaign that eventually got Maxine released from captivity in 2004 with a satellite tag that tracked her initial movements.

While Maxine’s release attracted plenty of attention, Rochat decided she needed to enlist the aid of a professional ad firm in order to reach a broader audience. The Cape Town branch of Saatchi & Saatchi devised a clever set of advertisements under the banner of “Rethink the Shark,” an ironic take on the classic beach scene from
Jaws
. While the initial shots resemble the movie—a pleasant day at the beach that quickly devolves into a scene of panic—the scary object jutting out of the water in the end is not a shark’s fin. Instead, it’s an ordinary object that takes many more lives worldwide each year than sharks: a toaster, a kite, or a chair, depending on the commercial. It’s an effective ad, partly because the inanimate objects are so banal. As the toaster floats, seemingly harmless, the tagline reads, “Last year 791 people were killed by defective toasters. 4 by sharks.”

Rochat didn’t stop with a single ad campaign. She’s come up with a slew of different ways to challenge popular perceptions of sharks. The shark tank in Two Oceans Aquarium now has a warning label posted on its inside stating, “Warning: Predators Beyond This Point.” The implication: humans are the predators, not the fish. In another public awareness stunt, Rochat littered a couple of South African beaches with shells that carried a recorded message from the sea, followed with messages in glass bottles from different creatures (Greg the Great White wrote, “Now I realize we have a BAD reputation because of that DAMN MOVIE, but we’re not like that”) and finally a coffin that washed ashore with a brass plate detailing the number of dolphins that drown each year in fishing nets. While Rochat’s main message is pretty grim, she does her best to leaven it with a bit of creativity. She chose to work with trained marketers because they think about how a message can infiltrate the public consciousness.