Savannah leads in controversial trade of shark fins

SAVANNAH — For the last three years the port of Savannah has been the U.S. leader in the export of shark fins, a legal but controversial trade item used to make shark fin soup, a delicacy in parts of Asia.

Federal fisheries data show that although no shark fin was exported from Savannah in 2013, the trade there jumped in the following years from 18,444 pounds in 2014 to 25,765 pounds in 2015. That amounts to about $1.2 million in shark fins over the two years. Last year through November the export amounted to 19,171 pounds, valued at $559,845. In each case the shark fins were shipped to Hong Kong.

Fort Worth, Galveston, Los Angeles, Anchorage and New York were all in the business of exporting shark fins in 2013, but of those ports only Galveston has continued through last year, and its poundage has fallen every year. The trade is changing, said Lora Snyder, director of responsible fishing for Oceana, an advocacy group working for a U.S. ban on the trade of shark fins.

Shark fins are controversial because they are sometimes harvested by cutting off the high-value fins while the shark is still alive, then dumping the less valuable body back into the water to be eaten alive, bleed to death, or drown. Activists condemn finning as both wasteful and cruel. Gruesome videos of the practice abound on the Internet with titles like “Sharks are Going Extinct for Fin Soup.”

The practice was banned in the U.S. by the 2000 Shark Finning Prohibition Act. But advocates said loopholes in that law made it less than fully protective. The 2010 Shark Conservation Act tried to tighten up the rules, requiring that all sharks commercially fished in the United States, with one exception, be brought to shore with their fins naturally attached. That can be hard to enforce, Snyder said.

Beginning in 2010, states began going one step further, banning the buying and selling of shark fins. Eleven states and three territories have trade bans. Georgia is not among them, which explains Savannah’s new role as lead export site. A change.org petition for a trade ban in Georgia has garnered more than 66,000 signatures.