The late Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund and, I am proud to be able to say, a man who encouraged and supported my early and youthful enthusiasm for matters environmental, once famously opined that, “If we can’t save whales, we can’t save anything.”
Well, if developments this week are any indication, “anything” had better start looking anxiously over its shoulder.
The basic details of the past twenty-five or so years of the whaling issue are widely known, but worth repeating briefly for context: In 1982, the International Whaling Commission voted to establish an indefinite worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, to come into effect with the 1985-86 Antarctic, and 1986 Northern Hemisphere, seasons. After initially lodging a formal objection to the decision, Japan dropped that objection, but almost immediately began circumventing the moratorium by calling its whaling activities “scientific research.” Norway has maintained its objection, and continues to conduct commercial whaling in the North Atlantic. And Iceland … Iceland is all over the place. It did not object to the moratorium, but hunted whales for “science” until 1989. In 1992, it left the IWC, but rejoined in 2002 with a retroactive “reservation” to the moratorium, and resumed whaling in 2006. Whaling_harpoon
Against this background – of commercial whaling supposedly being illegal, but being practiced anyway and even, in recent years, increasing – the Commission initiated, following its 2007meeting, a process on the “Future of the IWC,” establishing a small working group of a dozen or so commissioners to try and forge a path past the entrenched positions and status quo, in which pro- and anti-whaling forces lob rhetorical grenades at each other with little practical effect. The idea, in essence, was to try to forge some kind of deal, in which nobody got everything, everybody got something, and we could all forego the annual ritual of banging heads against walls that IWC meetings had become.
Deals, in principle, aren’t bad. (Heck, I supported one once). It’s bad deals that are bad. And the draft that has just been posted on the IWC’s website, in advance of next week’s final meeting of the small working group, is a bad deal.
Oh, it’s full of good language and good deeds. It talks about reducing the number of whales being killed, and of bringing whaling back under the control of the IWC (the same language that was used 13 years ago by the authors of the deal I supported). It proposes international observers on board whaling vessels, and a DNA registry of whale meat to better track meat that has been illegally caught or sold. It proposes that NGOs be allowed to speak at meetings of the IWC (which, being a relatively archaic convention, to this point has not permitted such shenanigans except in controlled situations).
It also proposes the establishment of a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary, which is something close to the heart of a number of NGOs and, importantly, many of the nations bordering that ocean.
The practical utility of such a sanctuary is, however, as Don King would say, “somewhere between slim and none. And slim just left town.” There is no whaling in the area of the putative South Atlantic Sanctuary; nor has any been proposed.
There is, however, still whaling in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, which the IWC adopted in 1994, and which, under the draft deal, gets royally shafted. Balaenoptera_acutorostrata_Neko_Harbour_Antarctica
It is in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary that Japan has killed – excuse me, scientifically sampled – the great majority of its whales in the last 25 years, and it will be able to continue to doing so with utter impunity should the draft deal be agreed by the commission. For all the window dressing, the crux of the agreement as presently constituted is that Japan, Norway and Iceland will all be allowed to continue whaling, unchallenged, for the next ten years. They won’t even have to try and provide any tortuous scientific justification. No more pseudoscientific “research.” The document states that under the deal, no other countries would be allowed to hunt whales, and the whaling ban would remain in effect. Except for, you know, all the whaling that would be taking place.
And why would those three countries be allowed to continue? Because they have outlasted their opponents, and have shown the stamina to keep going while the non-whaling countries have not. They have obfuscated, filibustered, dissembled, lied and delayed for a quarter-century, and now they are on the verge of getting just what they wanted.
As John Frizell of Greenpeace International observed:
The proposal rewards Japan for decades of reprehensible behavior at the International Whaling Commission and in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. We are at a critical junction for both whaling and ocean conservation. A return to commercial whaling would not only be a disaster for whales but will send shock waves through international ocean conservation efforts, making it vastly more difficult to protect other rapidly-declining species such as tuna and sharks.
The three key letters in the document are TBD: The number of whales each country will be allowed to hunt is “To Be Determined.” But reliable sources indicate that the three nations between them will be limited to 1,000, with 400 of them being from Japan’s hunt in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary. That’s fewer than they hunt now, but it’s exactly what they were hunting a few years ago. Japan appears to have been playing classic brinkmanship: appear to be demanding far more than you actually desire or expect, and then give the impression you have compromised when you agree to “settle” on exactly what you wanted all along.
The document states that whatever the figures will be, they will be “consistent with the principles of sustainability.” But the issue has never been with the size of the hunts taking place now. None of the whaling nations can even sell the meat of all the whales they presently hunt; their goal has always been to keep the infrastructure ticking over until such time as a market can be reestablished, and the industry can ramp up in size again. Of late, that was looking a desperately unlikely cause: Iceland’s whaling “industry” is now essentially one man on a quixotic mission, increasingly disavowed by his compatriots; Japan’s whaling fleet has at its center an aging vessel that has twice caught fire in recent years and can surely not hold out much longer, hunting whales for the meat of which there is little demand, surviving only thanks to massive subsidies at a time of economic recession and a new government urging financial prudence. This deal, should it be adopted, would look this rasping near-corpse of an industry in the eye and plunge a syringe of adrenalin into its heart.
To quote Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare:
This is a proposal for the long-term conservation of whaling, not whales…. It’s a great deal for countries that want to go whaling. What’s not to like? It puts science on hold, the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary on ice, and no restrictions whatsoever on the international trade in whale meat. And after 10 years, all bets are off — no more moratorium and much more whaling. We don’t need new observer schemes for commercial whaling, we need to make it obsolete. Rather than crafting elaborate proposals designed to please the last three countries killing whales for commercial purposes, the I.W.C. should first require them to respect the moratorium, exit the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and end commercial whaling conducted under the guise of science.
