Japan May Be Ready to Deal on Whaling, Insider Hints

Dave Hansford
for National Geographic News

March 26, 2008

When delegates met in London earlier this month for a special closed-door meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), they tried something new—they talked about compromises.

Perhaps the biggest deal on the table is the reported possibility that Japan may give up whaling in the Southern Hemisphere in exchange for the sanctioning of limited whaling closer to home.

Though no formal talks took place on that subject, New Zealand whaling commissioner Sir Geoffrey Palmer said, "It's in the air, let's put it that way."

Previously, every IWC meeting in 15 years had ended the same way: a deadlocked struggle for the required three-quarters voting majority—and the death of up to 1,200 whales each season.

"It has been like a political, legal, and diplomatic torture chamber," said New Zealand whaling commissioner Sir Geoffrey Palmer. "It's been really intense in there and really, really unpleasant."

For years the IWC has been crippled by a teetering power balance between the anti-whaling nations, led by New Zealand and Australia, and the pro-whalers, led by Japan and an entourage of developing African, Asian, and Caribbean countries.

The most divisive issue is Japan's "scientific" whaling program, which is widely condemned as a thinly disguised commercial operation that has so far killed about 12,000 whales, despite a moratorium imposed in 1986.

"Scientific whaling is a blank check," Palmer said. "Any government can engage in it and can take an unlimited number of whales. That makes an absurdity of the whole treaty."

But London marked a turning point. Delegates from both sides supported a call for reform and a return to consensus.

"I think [this] is a new approach for the Japanese," Palmer said. "That is to say, an approach which is showing more flexibility, more of a disposition to talk in a diplomatic way."

Striking a Deal

The IWC was set up under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, which was signed in 1946 to help conserve whales and create a sustainable whaling industry.

Since the 1986 moratorium, whaling is allowed only among aboriginal groups that traditionally hunt whales for subsistence.

There is also an exemption that allows countries to kill whales for scientific research.

Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research uses the exemption to take a number of different whale species each season.

The whale meat is then sold commercially, prompting many critics to question the validity of the country's scientific hunt.

At an IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last year Japan had offered to remove 50 humpback whales from its planned take if four Japanese coastal communities were allowed to catch a small number of minke whales under the subsistence-hunting exemption.

"We might come up with a package that will satisfy all member countries," Joji Morishita, Japanese alternative commissioner to the IWC, had said. "But we'd like to see acceptance of our coastal whaling proposal."

At the time anti-whaling nations had rejected the offer, saying they would not indulge in "horse trading."

"If they thought they were going to get some concession by not taking humpbacks, they were wrong," New Zealand's Palmer told National Geographic News earlier this month.

"It was a grotesque thing to put humpbacks on the program in the first place. [The Japanese delegation] can hardly be rewarded for withdrawing them."

In response to the lack of support for the proposal, the Japanese delegate threatened to pull his country out of the IWC.

Getting to "Yes"

But the possibility now exists that a deal will be struck allowing Japan to take as many as 400 minke whales from its own waters, provided that its whaling fleet leaves the Southern Hemisphere for good.

"It would be very similar to aboriginal subsistence whaling, but not identical," Palmer said.

"What we might look at is some possibility that scientific whaling be abandoned in return for some sort of concession."

Chris Howe, executive director for the New Zealand office of the international conservation group WWF, said that any deal should include an end to scientific whaling.

"Japan would whale coastally for a small number of minkes and only for domestic use, and quotas must be based on the [Revised Management Procedure] alone."

The procedure is a set of rules developed by the IWC that determines allowable catch limits based on estimates of whale numbers and catch figures past and present.

No matter what terms they might eventually discuss, many anti-whaling delegates are optimistic simply about what they see as Japan's willingness to negotiate.

Palmer says Japan may have realized that it went "a step too far" by threatening to kill humpbacks, the basis of many whale-watching operations in the Pacific.

In addition, violent encounters between whalers and protestors in Antarctic waters last month won Japan no public sympathy. (Read "Japan Denies Shooting Anti-Whaling Activist" [March 7, 2008].)

"We have to find some way of moving together toward a proposition that both sides can say yes to," Palmer said.

"Getting to 'yes' is what international negotiation is all about."

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