Vote brings commercial whaling move a step closer

THE International Whaling Commission (IWC) has entered unknown territory after a majority of members resolved to overturn the moratorium on commercial whaling.

But the vote will not mean an immediate return to the hunting of the mighty sea mammals — driven to the brink of extinction in the 1970s — as a 75% majority is needed to overturn the worldwide ban.

The resolution, approved by a vote of 33-32 with one abstention at the IWC’s meeting on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, declared that the moratorium on commercial whaling was meant to be temporary and was no longer needed.

Now Japan, Norway, Iceland, Russia and other whaling nations are setting their sights on returning the IWC to its roots as a group that manages the world’s whale population, rather than trying to prevent the killing of whales altogether.

“We will not take revenge against anti-whaling nations,” said Joji Morishita, chief spokesman for the Japanese delegation. “This is the beginning of a rational process of returning the IWC to a management organisation.”

Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said nothing would change, since Japan and Iceland already hunt whales under the auspices of scientific research while Norway ignored the 1986 IWC ban altogether.

“Vote or no vote, 2,400 whales will be killed in the next 12 months,” he said.

With the vote neck-and-neck, Denmark’s vote tipped the balance. Thirty-two countries opposed the declaration but Denmark’s support brought the vote in favour to 33.

The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) said that although the vast majority of Danes oppose whaling, the government of Denmark is compromised by the vociferously pro-whaling interests of its two overseas territories at the IWC — Greenland, whose Inuit hunters kill minke and fin whales and seek an expanded quota to include bowhead whales and humpbacks, and the Faroe Islands, where hundreds of pilot whales, Atlantic white-sided and bottlenose dolphins are slaughtered each year.

The leading pro-whaling nations revelled in their symbolic victory.

After years of encouraging small and developing nations to join the IWC — while financing and building their seafood industries — these countries gained legitimacy in an organisation long dominated by whaling opponents.

However, Tokyo has been accused of offering financial inducements to poorer countries to join the IWC, many of them without any history of involvement in whaling and some — including Mongolia in central Asia and Mali in western Africa — are entirely landlocked.

Australia’s Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, one of the IWC’s most vocal critics of whaling, said he welcomed a public battle for the IWC’s future.

“The anger expressed by the world when they see the first humpback hauled on board of a Japanese whaling ship will make my job a lot easier,” said Mr Campbell, referring to Japan’s plan to kill 50 humpback whales in 2007 and 2008 as part of its scientific whaling programme.

Another opponent of whaling, Brazil’s Jose Palazzo, branded the vote “a call to arms”.

Japan and other countries will hold a meeting to set a strategy for recasting the organisation’s mission.

Both camps maintain a core group of supportive nations, which they cajole for dues payments and votes. And both Mr Campbell and Mr Morishita said they would encourage new countries to join the IWC before next year’s meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

Speaking on behalf of the Whalewatch coalition, Niki Entrup, of the WDCS, said: “This tragic moment signifies a great step backwards in time to when the International Whaling Commission was nothing more than a whalers’ club.”