International whaling talks collapse

Saturday, 26 June 2010 22:30 Jay Salazar

Talks on a global whale hunting moratorium during the five-day annual meeting of the International Whale Commission (IWC) in Agadir, Morocco ended in an impasse, moving the commissioner to stop negotiations on the ban for one year, reported the Associated Press.

At the beginning of the summit, which brought together representatives from almost 90 countries, the IWC had presented a controversial draft proposal that would result in, among other things, overturning a 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling, while implementing quotas and closer supervision of hunts, for a decade.

The proposal was the outcome of about two years of talks led by the US and was based on the idea of lowering the number of whales killed annually by Iceland, Norway, and Japan, which take advantage of legal loopholes in the ban in order to continue their whaling operations. The Animal Welfare Institute in Washington said that ever since the moratorium took effect in 1986, about 33,600 whales have been killed.

Within an hour of the opening of the meeting, however, the IWC deputy chair had to suspend it as the participating countries found themselves unable to find common ground, even though some anti-whaling nations and environmentalist groups were willing to consider reforms in whaling regulation.

Yasue Funayama, the Japanese vice minister of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, said that the failure to break the impasse between the opposing camps was "unfortunate".

What proved to be the most contentious element of the proposal was the degree to which Japan was willing to scale down its Antarctic hunt. The European Union (EU), Australia, and the Latin American bloc were calling for a total phase-out, but Japan was unwilling to reduce the kill to zero.

In an interview with BBC News, Funuyama pointed out that Japan would agree to stop whaling in the Antarctic completely if the situation warranted it. "However, we do have evidence that the whale stock is sustainable if it is contained under a certain level of catch, and therefore we fail to understand why it has to be brought down to zero," she said. Critics responded by saying that Japan should stop its Antarctic hunts not because the whale stock was badly depleted but because the area is a whale sanctuary.

Many environmentalist groups blamed Japan for the failure of the talks, but former New Zealand Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who played a significant role in the meeting, said that such an assessment was "absolutely false". Farm and Fisheries Minister Masahiko Yamada said that Japan had "made as many concessions as it can, which was a time-consuming, substantial effort".

A number of delegates hailing from countries against commercial hunting told BBC that the whaling countries would have been willing to accept the imposition of quotas much lower than what they are observing had the anti-whaling camp sent the right signals.

Junichi Sato, a whaling campaigner with Greenpeace Japan, said, "Members of the IWC have missed an important opportunity to take steps towards ending commercial whaling."

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