Thursday, July 16, 2009
Notes from the International Whaling Commission Meeting in Madeira, June 22-26, 2009
By Mark J. Palmer
Associate Director
International Marine Mammal Project
Earth Island Institute
In the end, the IWC did nothing, and that was good.
The major issues before the International Whaling Commission at the recent meeting in Madeira, Portugal, were basically put off for more discussion.
One major issue was a pending deal between Japan and the United States’ representative, William Hogarth (also Chairman of the IWC). For two long years, Chairman Hogarth and the Japanese and a few other countries had been in secret negotiations to “break the impasse” at the IWC between the whaling and anti-whaling nations.
However, these negotiations really boiled down to getting Japan off the hook for its illegal whaling activity – issuing itself “scientific permits” to kill thousands of whales annually in the Antarctic and North Pacific Oceans. The crux of the deal was that Japan would reduce the number of whales killed under scientific permit if they were granted commercial whaling in their own waters of minke whales (currently killed under scientific permit), effectively ending the 25-year-old moratorium in commercial whaling.
But, as several of us predicted, Japan in fact had no intention of reducing the number of whales they are currently killing and made it clear just before the IWC meeting that they would go on killing whales any way they could.
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