


So where the shark are fins coming from? The Food Watchdog couldn’t find any at the seafood sections of two of Richmond’s huge Chinese groceries. A fishmonger at one stood amid dozens of huge tanks of bubbling salt water tending enormous live lobsters, eight type of live fish, trays of scallops in their shells and costly, live geoducks. “Shark fins are much more expensive, much more,” he said pointing to the world’s largest digging clam. Who sells them, I asked, explaining that I had questioned two large seafood stores nearby and another in Vancouver. “You’re not Chinese and you don’t own a restaurant. The fins can be easily purchased,” he explained and added that the dried fins come mostly from Japan and China. Fresh or frozen fins come through Texas or Mexico, frozen on dry ice packs or chilled in 40-pound cooler chests and driven north to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and British Columbia. Environmentalists have released videos showing thousands of sharks, laid out row after row, waiting to be finned at Japanese port-side factories. In this hemisphere, finning is rampant off Central and South America. Coast Guard and fishery service agents and marine scientists from Texas A&M marine laboratories estimate that more than 60,000 sharks a year are hauled from the Gulf of Mexico, where, they say, illicit sharkers often fish on the more shark-populated U.S. side of the invisible border. Big money can be made by shark finning. Look at one seizure made of a ship chartered out of Honolulu by a Chinese company. It was the King Diamond II, which was stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard 250 miles off the coast of Guatemala. The ship had no shark carcasses aboard but 64,695 pounds of fins it had collected from more than a dozen other fishing vessels. The load of shark fins would bring at least $2.6 million at dockside and more than $20 million on the retail market. Criminal activity doesn’t stop at the U.S. border. Agents of the U.S. fisheries service and the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations, busted Mark Harrison for violating the Lacey Act, a federal fish and wildlife trafficking law, for buying and selling fins of sharks caught in Florida waters. When Harrison pleaded guilty on August 19, 2009, he boasted that he was the “nation’s largest shark fin buyer” and had purchased “millions” of fins through his mom-and-pop operation in the Florida panhandle. For a peek at the retail end of the business check out the dried seafood emporiums on Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. There is no shortage of shark fin. In one store it’s in large candy jar-sized containers, row-after-row, on the wall, separated by size and texture and tagged with prices from $180 to $550 a pound. The neighboring store had the valuable fins in plastic bags in the glass display counter, labeled the same way with prices reaching $800 a pound.
