Japan Threatens to Quit Whaling Body, Ending Turbulent Meeting

John Roach
for National Geographic News

June 1, 2007

Japan threatened to quit the International Whaling Commission yesterday following a tumultuous week of meetings in Anchorage, Alaska.

The Asian country failed to gain support for a proposal to allow four of its coastal communities to hunt whales.

Antiwhaling nations said the proposal would have lifted the 21-year ban on commercial whaling.

Japan argued the coastal communities have whaled for thousands of years and the hunt should be allowed under the same rules that allow aboriginal groups such as Eskimos to whale.

Opponents contend that the Japanese communities are not traditional settlements and note that they already take part in Japan's so-called research whaling, which is condoned by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

"The commission wasn't interested," said Sue Fisher, U.S. policy director and whaling campaigner for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

"It saw through the attempt as being an effort to overturn the moratorium."

Japan scrapped the proposal once it became clear it would not pass.

Then, at the end of the meeting, the Japanese commissioner took the floor and threatened to leave the whaling body.

"There is a real possibility we will review at a fundamental level our role in the IWC and this would include withdrawing, setting up a new organization," Akira Nakamae said.

Japan has made similar gestures in the past and the threat is not being taken seriously, according to Fisher.

"This is just posturing," she said, "but obviously intended to rattle the like-minded antiwhaling countries enough so that over the course of the next year, they'll start asking Japan how they might make friends [with Japan] again."

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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