A traditional whaling crew and boat in Alaska (Office of United States Senator Ted Stevens, R - Alaska)
Peter Garrett, Aussie Environment Minister, wants to reform the International Whaling Commission (IWC). He says, “Australia will only support changes within the International Whaling Commission that bring us closer to our goals to eliminate whaling for good.” He expressed frustration that Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to hunt for commercial or scientific reasons, while much of the rest of the world would like to see the whale fishery abolished entirely.
The IWC was established in 1946 to “provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” However, some of the IWC’s relatively recent rulings were to establish a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986 and to create the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in 1994.
Here’s some more stuff about the fallout from these two decisions that I’ll just cut and paste straight from wikipedia:
As the moratorium applies only to commercial whaling, whaling under the scientific-research and aboriginal-subsistence provisions of the ICRW is still allowed. Since 1994, Norway, has been whaling commercially and Iceland began hunting commercially in September 2006. Since 1986, Japan has been whaling under scientific research permits. The US and several other nations are whaling under aboriginal whaling auspices. Norway lodged a protest to the zero catch limits in 1992 and is not bound by them. Anti-whaling countries and lobbies accuse Japan’s scientific whaling of being a front for commercial whaling. The Japanese government argues that the refusal of anti-whaling nations to accept simple head counts of whale population as a measure of recovery of whale species justifies its continuing studies on sex and age of population distributions, and further points out that IWC regulations specifically require that whale meat obtained by scientific whaling not go to waste. Japan, on the other hand, has raised objections to U.S. aboriginal subsistence whaling, generally seen to be in retaliation to anti-whaling nation’s (including the US’s) objections to aboriginal subsistence whaling for several Japanese fishing communities, which traditionally hunted whales until the imposition of the moratorium.
In May 1994, the IWC also voted to create the 11.8 million square mile Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The vote to adopt the sanctuary resolution was twenty-three in favour, one opposed (Japan) and six abstaining. (source: wikipedia)
The IWC is currently meeting in Rome to discuss, among other things, a proposal which would allow Japan to hunt whales in its coastal waters in exchange for reducing, or ending, it’s scientific whale research in the Southern Ocean.
Recent Comments