John Roach, National Geographic News 26 Jun 08;
Could a little whale hunting actually help save whales? That's one idea floating around this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Santiago, Chile.
The still unofficial proposal involves backing off a 22-year-old moratorium that bans all but a small amount of whaling for scientific and sustenance purposes.
Some problems with the ban as it stands include Iceland and Norway openly defying it to kill several hundred whales a year, and Japan's liberal and possibly dishonest use of "science" to justify its annual hunt of up to a thousand whales.
If the rule breakers are permitted to whale a little, the idea's proponents argue, then their hunts can be monitored and the effects of these hunts better understood.
"It would resume our science-based methods for determining how many whales can be safely harvested from a particular population," said Andrew Read, a marine conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Read has served on the IWC's scientific committee for more than a decade. He notes that any member country can already issue itself a permit to take as many whales as it wants for "scientific" research, as Japan does.
Susan Lieberman is the director of the World Wildlife Fund's global species program. She said whaling itself does not help conservation, but a compromise that ended unregulated killing would be worth considering.
"I think governments have an obligation to try to see if they can bridge the gap here," she said.
Nature of the Impasse
The IWC formed more than 60 years ago to manage and conserve whale stocks for the industry, but the organization has drifted toward conservation since the moratorium on commercial hunts was approved in 1986.
Japan maintains a research program that nets up to a thousand whales annually as it lobbies the IWC to lift the moratorium. Anti-whaling nations and activists consider Japan's scientific justification for its whaling a sham and vow to uphold the moratorium.
Hence the impasse, which saps time and energy from all parties involved but accomplishes very little.
Meanwhile, Read said, pressing scientific issues such as the effect of climate change on whales in the Arctic and Antarctic and estimates of whale stocks around the world are neglected.
"Most people looking at the IWC now just think it is badly broken and we need to try and fix it," he said.
Unlikely Compromise?
A ban backtrack as a compromise between whalers and conservationists will not be voted on at this year's meeting. Many details have yet to be hammered out.
For instance, Japan has previously sought approval for a limited hunt of minke whales off its coast.
One potential deal informally under consideration is to allow this hunt in exchange for an end to Japan's scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean, according to WWF's Lieberman.
"WWF isn't promoting limited whaling," she said. "What we're promoting is trying to stop the unlimited, unregulated whaling that's going on right now."
Glenn Inwood is a spokesperson for the Institute for Cetacean Research, which represents Japan on the IWC. In an e-mail exchange, he said, "Japan would not stop its research programs" even if coastal hunting were allowed.
But he noted that a well-managed commercial hunt based on science "would provide a benefit—a benefit to people while allowing the whale population to increase."
Patrick Ramage directs the global whale program for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which opposes any compromise that would allow for a resumption of commercial whale hunts.
"We reject this notion that we need to kill more whales to save them," he said.
He added that "the impasse is a bit false." Iceland, Norway, and Japan are the only IWC members that hunt whales for commercial purposes, he noted.
Most of the other countries that have voted to overturn the moratorium, he said, were recruited to the commission by Japan in return for fisheries aid.
"We should be discussing how Japan, Norway, and Iceland will join the vast majority of IWC member countries in putting down their harpoons, picking up cameras, [and] going whale watching," he said.
