The 57th meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Ulsan, South Korea will be a numbers game.
If Japan has the numbers—a simple majority of the countries that are members of the IWC—the pro-whaling nation and its allies could radically change the course of the entire commission, from a conservation-minded group to one striving to remove the final barriers to the resumption of commercial whaling. Commissioners and observers, including several staffers from Humane Society International, won't know the balance of power within the IWC until the first day of the plenary session on Monday, June 20. But many fear that Japan will have a simple majority, which would mark the first time that pro-whaling nations have controlled the IWC since 1982, the year when commissioners approved the commercial whaling moratorium.
Assuming pro-whalers have a majority, Japan has stated that it intends to dismantle the recently adopted Conservation Committee, and may shift the Scientific Committee's attention away from environmental threats to whales and welfare issues and direct it instead to develop whale quotas. The island nation would also likely strip the agenda of any whale sanctuary discussions while instituting secret balloting. Even more alarming, Japan has notified the IWC that it will put forward a proposal to adopt a Revised Management Scheme (RMS), which would include lifting the ban on commercial whaling, first implemented in 1986. To adopt an RMS, Japan will need a three-quarters majority, numbers that most observers believe Japan does not yet possess.
While most of the pressure to shift IWC's priorities and resume commercial whaling has come from Japan and its two closest pro-whaling allies, Norway and Iceland, this year's host nation, South Korea, will also exert significant influence, a fact not lost on Humane Society International President Patricia Forkan.
"It appears that Japan will secure the simple voting majority needed to force through its agenda of rolling back the conservation and welfare measures adopted over the past few decades," Forkan writes in an opinion piece she recently penned for a South Korean newspaper. "That’s bad news for whales, already under severe pressure worldwide, and Koreans should not take pride in the role that their government will likely play in this anticipated reversal."
While noting that South Korea officially abides by the commercial moratorium, Forkan sees a country with an appetite for whale meat, with some 50 restaurants within the nation's borders that serve the product. For a number of reasons, from the inhumanity of whaling itself to the financial boon of whale watching, Forkan believes that South Korea should side with conservation, not whaling.
"A survey of citizens in China, Korea and Vietnam conducted in late 2004 revealed that 90% believed that humans 'have a moral duty to minimize suffering' of animals and that they supported the passage of protective legislation," Forkan writes. "At some point, the Korean government will certainly find its position of reliable support for Japan’s whaling ambitions is out of step with the opinion and will of the Korean public."
Adds Forkan: "Of course, the burden of challenging Japan should not fall solely upon Korea. The United States and many European nations that oppose commercial whaling are not doing half of what they could to counter Japanese ambitions."
The RMS: Should Be DOA
Observers worry that Japan's ever-escalating whaling operations may have finally forced some countries to surrender to the island nation's will to adopt an RMS, which is a set of guidelines and rules to oversee commercial whaling should the moratorium be lifted. Their surrender is predicated on some shaky logic. The rush to adopt an RMS comes not from the fact that civil society wants a return to commercial whaling nor that whale populations have recovered to the point where they could be hunted again, but because Japan, Norway and Iceland exploit loopholes in the IWC Convention and kill increasing numbers of whales and other species each year.
Japan and Iceland kill whales under an exemption for scientific whaling, and Norway is allowed to kill whales because it filed an objection to the moratorium. These countries—Japan in particular—have become increasingly bold in their whaling operations, whether significantly boosting the number of whales killed annually or hunting in whale sanctuaries. Japanese officials reportedly announced that they will double their take of minke whales to 800 per year and add two new endangered whale species—fin and humpback. Likewise, Norway, whose whaling season opened in April, announced it will kill 797 minkes this year, 127 more than the quota set last year by Norwegian officials.
"Even when the moratorium went into effect in 1986, whaling continued because of exemptions in the Convention," HSI says in its opening statement for this year's IWC meeting. "This problem persists today, and nearly 20 years after the moratorium went into effect, (more than) 24,000 whales have been killed."
Some conservation countries believe that adopting an RMS will somehow bring all this whaling under control. However, the current draft of the RMS is fundamentally flawed. It has no enforcement mechanisms, no penalties, no international inspectors, and no power to stop the most egregious expansions of whaling—scientific whaling and whaling under an objection or reservation.
"If adopted, the RMS would be a management scheme in name only," says Kitty Block, director of Treaty Law, Oceans, and Wildlife Protection for HSI and co-author of the 2005 report, The RMS—A Question of Confidence?: Manipulations and Falsifications in Whaling.
"It would provide no real safeguards to protect whale stocks or individual whales, and it would provide no real consequences to nations that flout the nominal rules it would impose. It does not even match the protection measures in modern fishery treaties to manage hunting of species far less vulnerable to cheating and over-exploitation than whales. In short, the draft RMS would create the same sort of chaotic conditions that led to the dramatic decline of whale populations in the first place."
The only way to stop the abuses of scientific whaling and whaling under objection/reservation is to amend the IWC Convention, notes Block. New Zealand has proposed a protocol to close the loopholes enshrined in the Convention. HSI strongly supports amending the Convention.
"Instead of negotiating whether to adopt an RMS and lift the moratorium, member governments would better serve whale conservation and bolster the reputation of the IWC by amending the Convention to close the loopholes and modernize its provisions," HSI writes in its opening statement. "The unfettered right to issue special permits and to whale under reservation/objection must be removed from the [Convention]. Moreover, new provisions allowing for enforcement and compliance, currently adopted in other fishery agreements, should be added to the Convention. HSI, therefore, supports a protocol to the Convention that would close loopholes and add enforcement mechanisms, as a way to restore credibility to the IWC and provide the necessary protection for whales."
"Without it," Block notes, "species that have begun to recover will once again be driven to the brink of extinction."
