Pierre-henry Deshayes, Yahoo News 21 Jun 09;
OSLO (AFP) – Despite being officially illegal, the international trade in whale meat between the whale-hunting nations is quietly picking up again, say enviromental campaigners.
The issue has already become one of the flashpoints between pro- and anti-whaling campaigners in the run-up to the five-day annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which opens Monday.
Delegates at the conference, which this year will be in the Portuguese island of Madeira, will also debate the issue.
Japan, Norway, Iceland -- the main whaling nations -- all want to lift the ban on the trade, which is outlawed under the terms of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
Despite the 1986 international moratorium on whale-hunting, Norway and Iceland have resumed whaling, having reserved their position on the moratorium. Japan uses an opt-out that allows whaling for scientific purposes.
After a gap of two decades, Japan started importing whale meat in 2008: a few tens of tonnes of Iceland whalemeat and less than 10 tonnes from Norway.
This year, the Nordic nations want to increase that amount. One Norwegian firm, Lofothval, has obtained export licences for 47 tonnes of whale meat.
Iceland plans on exporting half its quota of 100 small Minke whales or 150 Fin whales.
For Truls Gulowsen, the head of environmental campaigners Greenpeace in Scandinavia, it is a sign of their desperation.
"That shows the despair of the whaling industry, that can't sell its products in Norway and so is trying to get rid of them abroad at any price," he said.
"But the Japanese eat less and less whale meat and their warehouses are alreday full of products that the local hunters can't get rid of."
Industry professionals reject that argument. For them, the Japanese market is a promising new market offering higher prices -- even if they will not discuss the precise figures.
"Japan, that's more than 120 million inhabitants," said Rune Froevik of Lofothval.
"Certainly, some of them still have to get their palates accustomed to a product that they haven't all tasted, but they are receptive because a large part of their diet already comes from the sea.
And the Japanese consume the fat of the whale, which in Norway is considered a waste product.
"Each catch becomes more profitable because a small Minke whale contains 1.5 tonnes of meat and 500 kilos of blubber," said Froevik.
As well as their reservations over the 1986 whaling moratorium, Japan, Iceland and Norway have also questioned the need for having whales on the CITES list of endangered species.
That position leaves them free to trade among themselves in the meat.
"We have certainly tried to get the whale off this list but we have come up against political obstruction," said Oeystein Stoerkersen, who heads up Norway's Directorate for Nature Management.
"The experts, including those abroad, agree that the species we are hunting are not under threat, but certain decision-makers in the United Sates, Britain and in Germany or France are trying to scrounge votes by pandering to ill-informed public opinion," he said.
According to the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee, the North Atlantic has 30,000 Fin whales and 174,000 Minke whales.
For Norway that is enough to all the harpooning of about 1,000 whales a year.
Under-pressure whale chief seeks compromise
Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 20 Jun 09;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – After three years as the man in the middle of global passions on whaling, Bill Hogarth has reached a conclusion he concedes won't be popular -- everyone must compromise.
Hogarth, chair of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and also its US delegate, heads his last meeting of the 85-nation body from Monday in Portugal. He hopes it will inch ahead on his vision to bridge the deep divisions.
It's not an enviable task. Australia and Japan, arch foes on whaling, have both publicly rejected the contours of his grand compromise. At home, a top US congressman has sought to sack Hogarth.
Hogarth, a jovial 70-year-old academic with a deep Southern drawl from his native Virginia, said that all sides on the whaling dispute needed to realize that they cannot have everything.
"There's an old Southern expression, hold your nose and then move forward," Hogarth told AFP.
"If everybody wins, of course you have no solution," he said. "Everybody will have to suffer some pain, although I hope the whales don't."
The IWC imposed a global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. But Japan, which says whaling is part of its culture, kills more than 1,000 whales a year through a loophole that allows lethal research on the ocean giants.
While Norway and Iceland defy the moratorium altogether, Japan's whaling is especially controversial as much of the hunt takes place in the Antarctic Ocean despite protests by Australia and New Zealand and harassment by eco-militants.
Hogarth has floated a compromise under which Japan would scale down its "scientific" whaling in the Antarctic but enjoy the right to "coastal" whaling closer to home.
Top ministers in Tokyo and Canberra have criticized the plan, but Hogarth said all sides needed to realize they cannot do "business as usual."
"I think it's unrealistic to think Japan and Norway and Iceland are going to give up taking all whales, go to zero. I also think it's unrealistic for these countries to think they can go on killing the same number of whales," he said.
Hogarth criticized the size of Japan's catch -- suggesting the Japanese may be killing more whales "just to prove a point" -- and warned that global whale stocks were "in bad shape."
In 2007, Hogarth succeeded in persuading Japan not to start killing humpback whales, beloved by Australian and New Zealand whale-watchers.
But Hogarth said anti-whaling nations should set a more realistic goal of limiting rather than ending Japan's catch.
Congressman Nick Rahall, who heads the House Committee on Natural Resources, has strongly rejected Hogarth's strategy and had urged President Barack Obama to sack him.
Rahall, a member of Obama's Democratic Party, said Hogarth's proposal would permit a form of commercial whaling without guaranteeing that fewer whales would die.
Days before the meeting in Portugal, Rahall introduced legislation to require the next US commissioner to the IWC to be an Obama appointee -- a shot across the bow that Congress does not want Hogarth to stay.
Rahall voiced hope the next US commissioner and the Obama administration will "pursue a fresh course, and exert clear and unambiguous leadership that will bring an end to the negotiations that would sanction commercial whaling."
Phil Kline, an oceans campaigner at Greenpeace USA, gave Hogarth credit for bringing civility to IWC meetings, long notorious as shouting matches.
Hogarth, a dean at the University of Southern Florida, tapped a veteran UN peace negotiator, Alvaro de Soto, for advice on negotiating tactics.
But Kline said tension was simmering below the surface between pro- and anti-whaling camps.
"It's like two guys sitting and having a stare off and waiting for the other to blink so they can claim the other side destroyed the negotiations," Kline said.
Hogarth took the criticism in stride, acknowledging there are "strong, strong feelings of US citizens about the lethal take of whales."
"As chair, I've been trying to walk that narrow path of being fair to all 85 countries," he said.
"And I think there's a reason that other countries would like to see a resolution," he said. "I'm an optimist."
Whaling talks target compromise
Richard Black, BBC News 21 Jun 09;
The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) opens shortly, with compromise talks between pro- and anti-whaling bloc delicately poised.
The compromise "package" would see Japan trim its Antarctic hunt in return for the right to catch whales quasi-commercially in its coastal waters.
The original aim of finishing the talks by this year's meeting has been missed.
Iceland will face criticism from anti-whaling groups for expanding its hunt of fin whales, listed as endangered.
The first fins of the season, from an annual quota of 150, were taken last week.
This year's meeting is also likely to see intense debate over Greenland's renewed efforts to add humpback whales to the species already hunted by its indigenous Inuit communities.
Scientific catch
Under the IWC's US chairman William Hogarth, compromise talks began formally a year ago but have not progressed as he hoped.
"We didn't get to where we wanted to be, but there's a lot of thought going into how we do it," Mr Hogarth told BBC News.
"Countries take these issues very seriously, and some constituencies don't want to give anything - that makes things very difficult."
The main demand of anti-whaling nations has been that Japan must end - or place under international supervision - its scientific hunting programmes.
The 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) allows any country to catch as many whales as it wants for research.
But critics say the measure was never intended to be used for catches numbering hundreds each year.
Japan's main aim is that four coastal communities with a history of whaling be allowed to hunt 150 minke whales each year for local consumption.
Thin end of the wedge
Although keen to see an end to scientific hunting, some anti-whaling countries have grave reservations about the proposed deal.
"We do have concerns over Japan's proposal for coastal whaling," said UK environment minister Huw Irranca-Davies.
"We see this as the thin end of the wedge in regard of what Japan's intention may be, but also what it could potentially open up for other countries, notably South Korea," he told BBC News
Earlier this year the South Korean government indicated it would seek a coastal whaling quota if Japan's bid were successful.
Portugal's environment minister Humberto Rosa said he was not opposed to coastal whaling in principle - the key was in the detail.
"The way to go in my opinion is to make it very conditioned, so we don't have coastal whaling anywhere in the world but only in some very special restricted and controlled situation, and with less whales killed than today," he said.
Despite their reservations, the UK and its European allies want the negotiations to continue for a further year - as do Japan and the US.
But as delegates emerged from a final session of preliminary talks on Sunday, different views emerged on whether a deal was still worth pursuing.
Some delegates suggested that fundamental divisions could yet force the process's termination before the end of the week; one said talks were "on the brink".
Collapse would leave the regulation of whaling and the conservation of whales as fractured - and in many peoples' view, dysfunctional - as it has been for the last two decades.
Flexible on fins
Iceland's whale hunt has been much smaller than Japan's in recent years; but in January, to the fury of conservation groups, the outgoing government of Geir Haarde granted an annual quota of 100 minke whales and 150 fins.
Only seven fins had been caught in the previous three years. The company involved, Hvalur hf, acknowledges there is no market in Iceland for the meat, but intends to export as much as possible, with Japan the main destination.
Hvalur says the local population of fins, thought to number about 30,000, is not at risk.
Iceland is expected to apply to join the EU later this year as a way out of its crippling financial crisis, and anti-whaling groups believe the EU will demand the abandonment of whaling as a condition of membership.
But Mr Rosa said this was not necessarily the case.
"That's something we'll have to settle with Iceland and within the EU," he said.
"We can have the flexibility within the EU to accommodate very different national circumstances."
Iceland's close neighbour Greenland is also likely to attract ire from conservation groups as it seeks for the third year in succession to include humpback whales in its annual hunt.
The bid was rejected at the last two IWC meetings because of concerns that the hunt had become too commercial in nature, and that Greenland had not adequately made the case that its Inuit communities actually needed the meat.
But IWC scientists have ruled that the quota is sustainable, and those in favour of whaling will probably cite that fact - as they did last year - as evidence that the anti-whaling bloc are more concerned with the emotional appeal of the acrobatic humpback than they are with science and the nutritional needs of indigenous peoples.
