Santiago, Chile
by Bernard Unti
Chile’s president signs law to prohibit whaling, establish sanctuary, as IWC consensus talks continue
On a day characterized by procedural discussions and closed door conversations at the IWC, Michele Bachelet, Chile’s president, claimed the major headlines worldwide. At Quintay, the site of a defunct whaling station where thousands of harpooned whales were brought ashore and processed between 1945 and 1967, she declared a permanent ban on whaling in Chile and announced the establishment of a new marine sanctuary along the country’s 2500 mile-long coast. With Bachelet were government ministers from four IWC contracting nations, including Australian Environment minister Peter Garrett, onetime singer in the group Midnight Oil.
Alarming Talk of Compromise
At the conference itself, conversations aimed at formation of a small group task force to forge compromise and consensus within the IWC continued, with alarming indications that the small group would exclude NGO groups and thus pursue its work with a lack of transparency. These discussions followed upon two days of meetings last week devoted to the future of the IWC. Leading the drive for a package of compromise, is IWC Chairman William Hogarth, who also serves as head of the U.S. delegation.
The behavior of U.S. officials here suggests that the Bush Administration wants a compromise as well. If true, the administration would seem to be acting out of step with the unanimously approved congressional resolution approved on June 19, which called upon the U.S. delegation to avoid any compromise that resulted in the approval of commercial whaling of any kind. This year, the commercial nature of several transactions involving aboriginal subsistence whaling quotas, and the looming reintroduction of the Japanese proposal for small-scale commercial coastal whaling, give added significance to the apparent disconnect between administration policy and the will of the U.S. Congress. And it is the delegations of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and several Latin American nations that are showing leadership in the early going here.
Topics of Discussion
In open session, the IWC delegates reviewed the report of the Scientific Committee, which ended its meetings in Santiago last week. A new study based on DNA samples taken from whale meat purchased in Japan since 2006 suggests that the whaling program in the Land of the Rising Sun may be underreporting its kill of fin whales. Reliably, the UK raised its concerns about the failure of several contracting nations to file welfare and killing method reports, and several national delegations pushed the notion of coordination with OIE and its standards on the slaughter of domestic animals for food. The UK also arraigned Japan’s unusually high catch of minke whale fetuses within its scientific research whaling expeditions.
The big buzz outside of the conference hall focused on Greenland’s proposal for an increase in catch limits of its humpback quota, and the possibility that European nations voting as a bloc would oppose it.
In the main press event at the conference hotel, the “Who’s Eating the Fish” press conference, sponsored by Humane Society International (HSI), World Wildlife Fund and the Pew/LENFEST program, drew an attentive crowd of reporters, delegates, and NGO observers. Dr. Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, brought to the IWC as a guest of HSI, laid out the case that the industrial fishing fleets of developed nations, not the whales of the world, are responsible for the depletion of global fisheries.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere
Meanwhile, five thousands miles away, in Washington, DC, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear the U.S. Navy’s challenge to a lower court’s order protecting whales off the California coast from the deleterious impacts of high-frequency sonar used during naval training exercises. Whale campaigners, pointing to the cases of dead whales washed ashore in the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, and the Madeira Islands after nearby war games, have long contended that the Navy could adopt commonsense safeguards without any repercussions for national military readiness.
It is a long distance from the whaling station at Quintay, whose concrete remnants are graced with an inscription of “La Ballenera de Quintay,” Pablo Neruda’s haunting evocation of the bloody business once carried out there, to the hallowed center of American justice. But the Supreme Court announcement served as a pointed reminder that whaling is not the only threat that whales face, and that, even in the unlikely probability that commercial whaling should suddenly end, there would always be a need for vigilance and activism in the defense of whales.
