Attitudes Shifting on Shark Fin Soup

[vladimir]

This NY Times article cites some hopeful signs in Chinese attitudes towards shark's fin soup:

A survey of about 1,000 Hong Kong residents, published here earlier this month and believed to be the most in-depth study of its kind to date, showed 78 percent of respondents considered it “acceptable” to leave shark fin soup off the menu at events like weddings.

That is a pretty surprising majority, considering the dish’s tremendous status-symbol appeal. Moreover, since nearly 90 percent of the soup is consumed at such set-menu affairs, this shift is an important sign that actual consumption in Hong Kong could be waning.

It is pretty sad, to me, to see the United States among the top fishing nations:

Hong Kong is not a key player in the actual fishing of sharks. The list of top fishing nations includes Argentina, France, India, Indonesia, Spain and the United States, according to a report by the wildlife monitoring network Traffic and the Pew Environment Group, published in January.

But the city is the main hub for the world’s shark fin trade. About 9,000 tons of fins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, are imported each year, according to government statistics. So what happens in Hong Kong matters globally.

Encouragingly, attitudes also appear to be shifting in the vastly bigger mainland market, according to Peter Knights, executive director at WildAid.

I hope there are members of the US Congress willing to follow Ding Liguo's good example:

In another sign that the topic is getting top-level attention, a deputy of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, Ding Liguo, filed a proposal last month to ban trade in shark fins, according to a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

“Only legislation can stop shark fin trading and reduce the killings of sharks,” Mr. Ding said, adding that the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan consume 95 percent the world’s fins.

Lest we get too optimistic, the article concludes:

As for sharks, the trade in their fins is ultimately going to end, said Mr. Knights of WildAid. “The question is, will it end while we’ve still got some sharks left?”

 

[Peter_C]

Now what age range did they survey? The younger generation is going to feel much different than the older generations. I have seen this first hand.

 

[smellzlikefish]

Peter C alludes to a much larger issue with the study-that of bias. A 1000 subset of a population of a billion (or whatever China's population is) is tiny. I have a hard time believing that this was the most comprehensive survey about shark finning and even if it was, how did they pick those 1000 people?

 

[vladimir]

Peter C alludes to a much larger issue with the study-that of bias. A 1000 subset of a population of a billion (or whatever China's population is) is tiny. I have a hard time believing that this was the most comprehensive survey about shark finning and even if it was, how did they pick those 1000 people?

I am not in a position to defend the study--I only know what is in the article--but I would observe that:

--The poll was of Hong Kong residents, of which there are about 7 million, and does not claim to predict attitudes of China's population, but rather that of Hong Kong's. Although part of China, Hong Kong would indeed be a biased sample of the Chinese population, just as a sampling of San Francisco residents would be a biased sample of the US population. The comments in the article about mainland attitudes were one man's anecdotal observation, not based on a scientific survey.

--Bias and sample size are two separate issues. Ideally, a survey would be free of bias; more likely, a well-designed survey recognizes and corrects for it. The confidence interval will depend on sample size; Zogby, Gallup, et al routinely predict the attitudes of the US population--~50 times larger than Hong Kong's--with a sample size of 1,000 and a confidence interval of +/- 3%.

--The study was supervised by somebody who sounds like he'd be aware of these basic issues of statistical sampling:

Previously, he served two terms as elected Dean of Social Sciences and was a member of the Statistics Department in The University of Hong Kong....John is an applied statistician with wide ranging methodological skills that he has applied to many research and policy questions during his 29 years in HKU.