Sharks are fished primarily for their fins, meat, liver oil, and cartilage. These four products fuel a multi-billion-dollar global industry that kills an estimated 100 million sharks per year. Beyond intentional fishing, millions more are caught accidentally in nets and on hooks meant for tuna and swordfish. Here’s a breakdown of each driver and why shark fishing has proven so difficult to slow down.
The Shark Fin Trade
Shark fin soup is the single biggest reason sharks are targeted worldwide. The dish is a traditional luxury item consumed by Asian communities across the globe, and the demand it creates drives industrial-scale fishing of dozens of species. Blue sharks are one of the most commonly traded species, moving through major markets in Hong Kong and Singapore. A single bowl of shark fin soup can cost anywhere from about $9 to over $50, and fins themselves can sell for hundreds of dollars per kilogram depending on size and species.
The practice of “finning,” where fishers slice off a shark’s fins and discard the body at sea, has drawn widespread condemnation. Many countries have passed anti-finning laws requiring that sharks be landed whole, but overall shark deaths from fishing still climbed from 76 million per year in 2012 to as many as 101 million in 2019. The laws haven’t reduced total kills so much as changed how the carcasses are handled.
Shark Meat as Food
While fins get the most attention, shark meat is a massive global commodity in its own right. The worldwide trade in shark and ray meat is worth an estimated $2.6 billion. Spain is the top exporter, Italy the top importer, and the European Union accounts for over 20% of global shark meat trade. Major trade routes connect Japan and Spain, the UK and Spain, Portugal and Spain, and Japan and Panama.
Many consumers don’t even realize they’re eating shark. It’s sold under local names in fish markets around the world: “flake” in Australia, “rock salmon” in the UK, “cazon” in Spain. This lack of labeling transparency means demand for shark meat is higher than most people assume, and it operates largely outside the public debate about shark conservation.
Liver Oil and Squalene
Shark livers are unusually rich in squalene, an oily compound with wide industrial use. Squalene is valued for its moisturizing and antioxidant properties, making it a common ingredient in skincare products and cosmetics marketed for anti-aging. It also functions as a vaccine adjuvant, a substance that boosts the immune response when mixed with a vaccine. Research has shown squalene-based adjuvants improve immune responses in poultry vaccines and are used in some human flu vaccines as well.
Deep-sea shark species, which carry especially large, oil-rich livers, are heavily targeted for this purpose. Plant-based alternatives derived from olive oil and sugarcane exist, but shark-derived squalene remains cheaper to produce at scale, keeping demand steady.
Cartilage Supplements
The shark cartilage supplement market was valued at $1.62 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.14 billion by 2032. These products are marketed primarily for joint health, with claims that the chondroitin sulfate in shark cartilage can relieve pain from osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. Some products are also sold as anti-aging skincare ingredients, and shark cartilage has been investigated for potential anti-cancer benefits, though that claim remains unproven.
The popularity of these supplements creates a steady, year-round demand for shark carcasses that operates alongside the fin and meat trades. For fishing operations, being able to sell fins, meat, liver oil, and cartilage from a single animal makes each catch more profitable and harder to discourage.
Bycatch: The Unintentional Kill
A significant portion of shark deaths happen by accident. Commercial longline and purse seine fisheries targeting tuna and swordfish routinely hook sharks that weren’t the intended catch. The numbers are staggering. In New Zealand’s tuna longline fishery, sharks make up 30 to 50% of the total catch. In the Spanish swordfish longline fishery in the Indian Ocean, sharks accounted for 41% of the total catch between 2004 and 2006, roughly 4,436 tons per year. In Spain’s Atlantic longline fishery targeting other open-ocean fish, sharks comprised over 70% of the total catch by weight.
Purse seine fisheries report much lower bycatch rates, sometimes under 1%, but those figures typically only count sharks that are kept on board, not those pulled up and thrown back dead or dying. The true toll is almost certainly higher. Because longline fishing uses thousands of baited hooks stretched across miles of ocean, it’s nearly impossible to avoid catching sharks that share habitat with tuna and swordfish.
Why Conservation Efforts Struggle
International protections have expanded in recent years. At the 2022 CITES conference, Panama proposed listing 19 species of requiem shark under Appendix II, which requires countries to prove their trade is sustainable before exporting. All 19 species are classified as Endangered or Critically Endangered, with unsustainable fishing driven at least partly by international trade demand. The proposal was adopted, but enforcement varies widely by country, and illegal fishing remains common in international waters where oversight is minimal.
The economic incentives work against conservation in most fishing communities. A harvested shark’s parts, split among fin traders, meat markets, supplement manufacturers, and cosmetics companies, can be worth significant money to a fisher in a developing nation. But research from Palau tells a different story at the ecosystem level. A population of about 100 reef sharks that regularly interact with dive tourists generates far more revenue alive than dead. If those same sharks were harvested, their total market value would be at most $10,800, a tiny fraction of what they bring in through sustainable dive tourism year after year.
That gap between the one-time value of a dead shark and the ongoing value of a living one is central to the conservation argument. Countries with strong ecotourism industries, like Palau, the Maldives, and the Bahamas, have found it economically rational to protect sharks. But in regions where tourism infrastructure doesn’t exist and fishing is one of few available livelihoods, the math looks very different to the person holding the hook.