MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Fears that IWC might become a “whalers' club”

A nonbinding declaration critical of the 1982 decision to impose a moratorium on commercial whaling was approved by a 33-32 vote Sunday at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in the Caribbean island of St Kitts.

While this was the first time the pro-whaling camp attained a majority on a key issue on the IWC agenda since the commission adopted the ban, it does not mean an end to the moratorium because lifting it requires a three-quarters majority.

Japan, Norway, Iceland, Russia and other whaling nations are committed to return 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." "The moratorium, which was clearly intended as a temporary measure, is no longer necessary," says the St. Kitts and Nevis Declaration, which was proposed jointly by 30 nations.

The declaration says the use of cetaceans in many countries contributes to food security and poverty reduction, while stressing that "the use of marine resources as an integral part of development options is critically important at this time for a number of countries experiencing the need to diversify their agriculture."

It also states that whales consume huge quantities of fish, making the issue a matter of food security for coastal nations.

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. "We're dealing with an ecosystem where whales are on top of the food chain," said Daven Joseph, an IWC delegate from St. Kitts and Nevis. "That's like blaming woodpeckers for deforestation," countered Vassili Papastavrou, "the real issue is overfishing, not whales."

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.

After years of encouraging small and developing nations to join the IWC, while financing and building their seafood industries, the pro whaling 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".