Posted on 19-7-2004

World moves towards a return to commercial whaling
By Michael McCarthy and David McNeill, NZ Herald, 19 July 2004

A step towards the return of commercial whaling will be taken this week if
pro-whaling countries achieve - as many expect - their first majority
voting bloc on whaling's governing body.

Japan, Norway and Iceland - all still hunting the great whales in defiance
of the 18-year international moratorium on their killing - are on course
to gain control of more than 50 per cent of the votes at the 2004
International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting, which begins in Sorrento,
Italy, today.

Hitherto, the anti-whaling nations, led by the US, Australia, New Zealand
and Britain, have held a controlling majority of IWC votes. But in a
tireless diplomatic offensive, the Japanese have spent more than 10 years
and many millions of pounds recruiting small nations to the IWC as whaling
sympathisers, in return for substantial development aid.

The commission, which at its outset had only 30 members, now has 57, and
the long game Japan has been playing may well bear fruit in Sorrento, when
the pro-whalers are likely to achieve their majority at last.

Britain's Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) has tracked this
process in detail, documenting how many small nations who now vote with
the Japanese, such as St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua &
Barbuda, have become overwhelmingly dependent on Japanese aid.

The process is continuing, and in recent months both the Pacific island
state of Tuvalu and the Ivory Coast in Africa have applied to join the
IWC, with Japanese prompting suspected - while Surinam is thought to be on
the verge of applying.

Although the arithmetic is not yet completely certain, many observers
believe that the new arrivals will tip the balance of votes. While not yet
enabling them to abolish the whaling moratorium itself - that needs a 75
per cent majority vote - a simple majority of 51 per cent would be an
encouraging development for the whaling countries towards that ultimate
goal.

Furthermore, it would immediately give them considerable power to run the
IWC the way they want. They could, for example, exclude environmental
pressure groups and the media from the meeting, elect a new chairman, pass
pro-whaling resolutions and annul anti-whaling ones, and generally make
the IWC a body to promote commercial whaling rather than to regulate it.

"Tipping the balance of power means that whales will lose their safety net
of protection, the moratorium will be under threat, and the world will
once again hold its breath fearing for the future of these amazing
animals," said Margi Prideaux of the WDCS.

Since the 1986 ban, Japan has engaged in what it calls "scientific
whaling", designed to "monitor fish stocks and migration patterns,"
despite enormous flak from its political allies and international
environmental groups, while Norway has continued to hunt commercially by
simply entering an objection to the moratorium. Iceland has done a mixture
of both. The three countries together have killed more than 25,000 whales
since the 1986 ban started. Japan alone has hunted more than 5,000 minke
whales, many of which have ended up on up-market restaurants' menus.

The issue of whaling in Japan is strongly bound up with nationalist
sentiment and is one of the few international issues - perhaps the only
issue - on which the country takes a hard line. The public face of Japan's
pro-whaling lobby, Masayuki Komatsu, an ultra-nationalist and career
diplomat at the Ministry of Agriculture, revels in upsetting what he
contemptuously calls the "Save the Whalers" that dominate international
debate on the issue. He once advised the captains of whaling ships to
"blow Greenpeace protest boats out of the water" and regularly denounces
what he calls the "culinary imperialism" of the West.

Japanese pro-whalers such as Mr Komatsu, who boasts the misleading title
of director of fisheries research and environmental protection, believe
that countries such as America, Australia and Britain, which have much
more arable land for farming than Japan, are being hypocritical in their
condemnation of whaling. "These countries can raise cows and sheep because
they don't depend on the oceans for food," he said recently. "We don't
have that luxury." Mr Komatsu has argued for years that whale numbers have
increased to the point where they can safely be hunted again and that if
not controlled they eat other fish because they are the "cockroaches of
the sea".

Critics say the pro-whaling drive in Japan owes less to cultural
traditions, however, than industrial and political lobbying. Japan's
whaling "research fleet" is supported by the Institute of Cetacean
Research, the main organisation behind the country's whaling programme,
which argues that the population of minke whales has "risen tenfold" over
the past 100 years. The institute, in turn, is backed by a lobby of
nationalist politicians within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who
depend disproportionately on votes from Japan's fishing communities. It is
this push from the top that explains the fuss made over whaling in Japan,
despite the great yawn the whole debate provokes from most ordinary
Japanese, who now eat 40 times more hamburger meat than whale.

In a report submitted to the BBC last week, the LDP group boasted that,
after years of effort, "the balance of power within the IWC" between the
pro- and anti-whaling countries "has become almost equal". The report
proposed forming a breakaway group from the IWC and revising Japan's
payments to the organisation, which has continually blocked Tokyo's
attempts to have the moratorium reversed. Greenpeace Japan says that the
LDP group is working to revive the sale of whale meat around Japan, where
it is currently expensive and difficult to get.

At Sorrento, a new coalition of more than 140 anti-whaling and animal
welfare groups from more than 55 countries, called Whalewatch, will appeal
to the whaling nations to halt all killing, on the grounds that it is
simply too cruel. Its report,Troubled Waters, is a detailed scientific
study of how much violence is needed to slaughter the world's largest
animals in the open ocean. Its premise is that the act of killing the
great whales, usually by explosive harpoons, is unacceptably cruel.

In a foreword to the report, Britain's best-known naturalist, Sir David
Attenborough, writes: "The following pages contain hard scientific
dispassionate evidence that there is no humane way to kill a whale at
sea." Peter Davies, the director general of the World Society for the
Protection of Animals (WSPA), one of the leading groups in the coalition,
said: "Far from being a thing of the past, commercial whaling is
threatening to rear its ugly head and scourge our seas. The future of
whales is on a knife-edge, with pro-whaling nations having a real chance
of achieving a majority voting bloc that could jeopardise existing
restrictions on whaling. The Whalewatch coalition believes that whaling is
inherently cruel."

The technology used for killing whales has altered little since the 19th
century, when the grenade-tipped harpoon was invented. The harpoon is
intended to penetrate the whale's body before detonating, killing it by
inflicting massive shock and injury. Given the constantly moving
environment in which whales live and are hunted, achieving a quick clean
kill is inherently difficult. Despite its destructive power, the whaler's
harpoon often fails to kill its victim immediately and some whales take
over an hour to die. The difficulties in hitting a whale with any degree
of accuracy can be seen in the margin for human error. For instance,
despite similar killing methods being used, Norway reported that one in
five whales failed to die instantaneously during its 2002 hunt, while
Japan reported that almost 60 per cent of whales failed to die
instantaneously in its 2002-03 hunt.

None of this is likely to persuade the well-to-do clientele of one of
Tokyo's top whale restaurants, Ganso Kujiraya in Shibuya, from giving up
their favourite dish. Komi Morita could be found there recently tucking
into a plate of whale sashimi. "When I hear people say they don't eat
whale I feel sorry for them," he said. "It's delicious. The problem is
people are too sentimental about them. I think they're cute too, but so
are cows and that doesn't stop Westerners eating beef, does it?"

Cows are hardly nearing extinction though. "Neither are minke whales,"
says his companion Komi Morita. "Nobody in Japan wants to hunt whales to
extinction. We understand the need for controls. But being told by the
rest of the world that we can't eat them strikes us as odd."