THE hunt is on again. Not yet for whales, but for control of the organisation that will decide whether to resume the commercial killing of the largest animals on Earth.
Last week, by the slenderest of margins, the 70-nation International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted for a declaration that renounces past conservationist policies, strongly criticises environmental groups, and declares the organisation’s 20-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling to be moribund. A resumption of commercial whaling itself would require the votes of three-quarters of IWC members, but the politically charged declaration, and fading memories of 20th-century slaughter, mean it may not be many years until whaling returns, with quotas set by the commission’s scientific committee.
The IWC was established in 1946 as a small club of whaling nations. Intended to promote an “orderly” hunt, it instead presided over a bloody free-for-all that saw most whale populations collapse. Eventually the commission was taken over by non-whaling nations, which secured the three-quarters majority necessary to impose a moratorium on whaling, with exceptions for small-scale hunting by aboriginal communities and for research.
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Ever since the moratorium came into force in 1986, Japan has sought to overturn it. Last week, at the IWC’s annual meeting on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, many believed that moment had arrived.
Initially, things didn’t go to plan. Japan lost four votes that needed only a simple majority. These were on proposals to allow Japanese coastal villages to resume hunting of minke whales under the rules for aboriginal whaling; to abolish the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary; to make future voting at the Commission secret; and to remove dolphins and small whales from future discussions.
Then Japan turned the tables. It forced through, by a single vote, a declaration that reasserts the “sovereign right” of coastal nations to hunt whales, and denounces the countries that take an ethical position against whaling as acting “contrary to [the IWC’s] object and purpose”.
“Japan has forced through a declaration that reasserts the ‘sovereign right’ of coastal nations to hunt whales”
Since the 1986 moratorium, the commission has been dominated by a coalition of outright opponents of whaling and pragmatists concerned with breaking the hegemony of the whaling nations to give whale stocks time to recover. With the IWC’s scientific committee now reporting that “many species and stocks of whales are abundant and sustainable whaling is possible”, this coalition is breaking up. The Japanese declaration also successfully wooed many pragmatists by reasserting the convention’s remit as a “scientific” manager of whaling stocks.
