Tumultuous Week
Japan's threat to withdraw capped a tumultuous week.
On Tuesday aboriginal groups in the U.S., Russia, and the Caribbean were granted approval to continue their whale-hunting traditions for another five years.
Greenland, however, stymied the whaling body with a proposal to increase the number of whales its native people are allowed to hunt. The Danish territory sought more minke whales and the addition of bowheads and humpbacks to its quota.
Ultimately, the Danish territory won approval for 200 minke whales and 2 bowheads per year over the next five years, but no humpbacks.
The whaling commission will review the increase in minke and bowhead hunting at next year's meeting. If the bigger quotas are deemed unsustainable, Greenland will be under pressure to voluntarily drop the additions, Fisher said.
The commission also passed a resolution Thursday that upholds the 21-year ban on commercial whaling.
The move reversed a resolution passed at last year's meeting by a one-vote majority that said the moratorium was temporary and no longer necessary.
Thursday's resolution may discourage delegates from lifting a ban on trade in whale products at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) next week in the Netherlands, Fisher said.
Small Cetaceans
In another development, the commission adopted a resolution by consensus that urges action to save the critically endangered vaquita, a porpoise in Mexico.
(Related: "World's Smallest Porpoise Nearly Extinct, Experts Say" [December 19, 2006].)
The consensus resolution is a conservation first for a small cetacean, according to the international conservation group WWF. Cetaceans include whales, dolphins, and porpoises.
In addition, IWC members expressed opposition to a U.S. plan to open to oil and gas development an area of critical habitat for the eastern North Pacific right whale population.
The North Pacific right whale is listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Its Alaskan population was estimated at fewer than a hundred in 2006.
The plan to open up Alaska's Bristol Bay to oil and gas development is set to take effect on July 1. Bills to block the leasing are pending in the U.S. Congress.
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