Friday, Jun 24, 2005
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ULSAN (SOUTH KOREA): The International Whaling Commission on Thursday rejected Japan's proposal to allow its northern coastal communities to resume limited hunts of minke whales, dealing another blow to its efforts to roll back an international moratorium on commercial whaling. The commission, which regulates global whaling, defeated the proposal at its annual meeting 29-to-26, with three abstentions. Japan's proposal needed a three-fourths majority to pass. Tokyo had virtually no chance of gaining that margin, but had hoped for a simple majority to claim a symbolic victory showing that more countries in the organisation support the proposal than oppose it.
Stop killing
The country has yet to gain a majority on any key vote at this year's meeting, with members upholding a nearly 20-year moratorium on commercial whale hunts and calling for Japan to stop killing the mammals for scientific research. The meeting runs through Friday in Ulsan, South Korea. Joji Morishita, Japan's chief negotiator on whaling issues, has consistently claimed there is a majority in the organisation in favour of whaling. He remained optimistic after the vote. ``We saw some possibility for the future, so as a result it's mainly positive from our point of view,'' he said. The latest vote was on Japan's proposal to allow the killing of up to 150 minke whales a year in waters off its northern coast up to 2009 to ``alleviate the hardships of small coastal whaling communities.'' The IWC banned commercial hunts in 1986 because species were near extinction after centuries of whaling, and the moratorium can be overturned only with a three-fourths vote. Norway holds the world's only commercial whaling season in defiance of the ban. Japan, Norway and other nations which advocate what they call ``sustainable use'' of whales, this year are expected to kill more than 1,550 of the mammals. Japan's proposal on coastal catches was a ``reasonable request,'' said Rune Frovik, an official with the High North Alliance, a non-governmental pro-whaling organization based in Norway. ``What sustainable whaling means is harvesting nature's surplus,'' he said. Countries led by Australia and New Zealand and conservation groups including Greenpeace are promoting alternative ways of profiting from whales, such as through tourism and whale-watching. The commission on Wednesday rejected Japan's plan to more than double the number of whales it hunts each year for scientific research, passing an Australia-sponsored resolution saying that Tokyo shouldn't kill the whales to study them. Japan currently hunts about 440 minke whales per year in the research program. It says it must kill whales to properly study them, including their stomach contents to glean details of their diets. It then sells the meat, which is allowed under commission rules. Critics call it commercial whaling in disguise. The United States has criticised the programme, arguing that scientific advances allow researchers to adequately study whales while they're still alive. — AP
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