The world whaling body opened its annual meeting on Monday with a call by anti-whaling nations to beef up its conservation agenda and strengthen the international ban on the controversial practice.
It set the stage for a hotly-contested battle with whaling nations led by Japan and Iceland, who see the environmentalists’ cause as a bid definitively to end centuries of whale hunting.
German Consumer Minister Renate Kuenast, who formally opened the four-day International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting here, said there was a growing awareness of the dangers posed by over-hunting, pollution and noise.
”Whales are intelligent and sensible animals,” Kuenast, a member of the Greens party, said in English. ”We feel strongly committed to their conservation.”
Germany is one of 19 countries to sign a proposal here called the ‘Berlin Initiative’ that would change the focus of the IWC from whale management to whale protection.
Kuenast lobbied for the initiative, which may come to a vote later on Monday, urging the IWC to strengthen protection of marine mammals. ”I would like to see the IWC responsible for the protection of all whales.”
Whaling nations such as Japan and Iceland claim the initiative is a cover to ban whaling for good. They want the moratorium, which took effect in 1986, to be lifted.
Although widely flouted, environmentalists see the ban as crucial for the long-term preservation of whale stocks.
Japan and Iceland instead want a resumption of commercial whaling under a system of quotas and monitoring, but more than a decade of talks to adopt the scheme has failed to produce an agreement.
Those two countries have issued a thinly-veiled threat to resume commercial whaling on their own terms if the talks remained bogged down, and have tabled a series of proposals here that would allow greater scope.
Japan is also demanding that its whaling-based coastal communities be able to hunt 150 Bryde’s and 150 minke whales a year from the north Pacific.
Norway is the only IWC member openly pursuing commercial whaling thanks to a get-out clause inserted in the moratorium.
Japan already allows the killing of hundreds of whales a year for research purposes and Iceland is proposing to the IWC that it do likewise.
Critics accuse both countries of using science as a pretext for commercial whaling.
Anti-whaling countries are also calling at this conference for the creation of two new whale sanctuaries, one in the south Pacific and the other in the south Atlantic. – Sapa-AFP