Commercial whaling ban strengthened at Anchorage

Despite the continued killing of whales there was some good news when the International Whaling Commission endorsed the commercial whaling ban.

Anchorage, United States — Following last year's "St. Kitts Declaration", which mumbled that the moratorium on commercial whaling might not be necessary anymore, the anti-whaling countries have bounced back with a 37-4 vote for a resolution strengthening the commercial whaling ban.

You can read the full text of the "CITES Resolution" here.

This was a major victory for the voices of whale conservation worldwide.
At last year's meeting, 33 countries - led by pro-whaling Japan - voted in favour of the "St. Kitts Declaration," essentially an attempt to restart commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986.

That temporary, one-vote whaling majority was a wake up call, and as Japan continued to recruit votes in support of their position, often with lucrative aid packages, Greenpeace and other conservation organisations, like-minded countries, and whale supporters all over the world responded with their own efforts to ensure that the true opposition to whaling worldwide was reflected at this year's meeting.

We launched a website dedicated to enabling those who opposed whaling to be part of those efforts: I-GO/Defending the whales. Whale defenders who signed up at that site helped to motivate countries around the world to protect the whales. Recent months saw several countries joining or rejoining, like Peru, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Costa Rica and Ecuador - or even declaring they would swap sides to vote for the whales, like Nicaragua.

In addition, there were Big Blue Marches all over the world in support of whales - in New Zealand and Australia, India, Argentina, Ecuador, Netherlands, Peru, Spain, US, UK, France, Portugal, Columbia, Venezuela, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico, Morocco, Romania, Sweden, Singapore, Turkey - the list goes on and on!

And in Japan, the Whale Love Wagon reached out to the Japanese public in a very different voice, exploring the whaling issue from the perspective of former whalers, people who still eat whale meat, and Japanese youth. The latest instalment, an animation from academy-award nominee Koshi Yamamura, tells the story of a Japanese headmaster who saves a whale, repaying a debt he feels for the days when whales saved the Japanese people from starvation following World War II. "Once they saved us -- now it is our turn to save them" he says in this tiny, beautiful story.

What we didn't win

Yet while we achieved the major objective of maintaining the moratorium, the meeting was not entirely a success. The functional extinction of an entire species, the Baiji dolphin, - got just fifteen minutes of fame at the meeting, at the Anchorage's Captain Cook Hotel, which has just drawn to a close.

The Vaquita, the Mexican dolphin likely to become extinct in the near future, also garnered little mention. And there was no discussion whatsoever about the estimated 3,288 cetaceans that have died as bycatch from fishing vessels worldwide since the 59th IWC meeting started four days ago, or through human causes like ship strikes, pollution, bycatch and climate change.

Instead, a huge chunk of meeting was spent arguing over the resumption of commercial whaling, with Japan's JARPA II "scientific whaling" hunt later this year drawing censure from most countries. Japan aims to kill 50 threatened humpback whales in the Southern Ocean later this year, and the "Resolution on Jarpa" with 40 countries voting against Japan's "research" expeditions - which are really just commercial whaling in disguise.

Japan also proposed a resolution that its coastal whaling communities should be allowed to engage in commercial whaling, because of its similarity to subsistence hunts by indigenous people in other countries. The problem is, for the last decade, the UN has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, requested Japan's government to recognise the rights of Japan's own indigenous people - the Ainu - in the north of Japan, so it's hard to see how they can claim empathy with indigenous people elsewhere. Japan eventually withdrew the proposal.
Sore losers

Japan routinely threatens to leave the IWC every year that it doesn't go well for them, and this year was no exception. This year they said they want to start another whaling organisation, and to start coastal whaling.

Jun Hoshikawa, executive director of Greenpeace Japan said that this was just posturing by Japan.

"Japan can't just walk away - whaling isn't such a big business in Japan that other important international relationships can be compromised".

The meeting, IWC 59, kicked off on Monday with Japan requesting everyone to act "civilly." That sentiment didn't go too far - there was soon a wave of so-called "hate votes" - the refusal of pro-whaling countries to participate in votes they didn't like the look of; threats to walk away from the whole process from Japan, and an almost total failure of all members to consider in detail the real threats to whales and dolphins.

Finally, the IWC's member nations have agreed to a special meeting to discuss reform of the organisation. But unless "reform" means actually modernising the IWC to properly address the major threats to cetaceans - which kill one animal every 90 seconds - and stop the most preventable cause – hunting - then that meeting will just become another soapbox for political grandstanding, where the only victims will be the whales.

© Scoop Media