Whales are such beautiful, majestic animals. It breaks my heart to know how
they are being mercilessly slaughtered around the world for the sake of
financial profit in most cases, and not out of real necessity.


U.S. Leads New Bid to Phase Out Whale Hunting

By JOHN M. BRODER - NYT

April 14, 2010


WASHINGTON -- The United States is leading an effort by a handful of
antiwhaling nations to broker an agreement that would limit and ultimately
end whale hunting by Japan, Norway and Iceland, according to people involved
with the negotiations.

The compromise deal, which has generated intense controversy within the
88-nation International Whaling Commission and among antiwhaling activists,
would allow the three whaling countries to continue hunting whales for the
next 10 years, although in reduced numbers.

In exchange, the whaling nations -- which have long exploited loopholes in
an international treaty that aims to preserve the marine mammals -- would
agree to stricter monitoring of their operations, including the placing of
tracking devices and international monitors on all whaling ships and
participation in a whale DNA registry to track global trade in whale
products.

Officials involved in the negotiations expressed tentative hope that they
could reach an agreement in coming weeks. But ratification by the overall
group remains uncertain.

"This is one of the toughest negotiations I've been involved in in 38
years," said Cristian Maquieira, the veteran Chilean diplomat who is the
chairman of the commission. "If this initiative fails now, it means going
back to years of acrimony."

Some pro-whale activists say the deal would grant international approval for
the continued slaughter of thousands of minke, sei and Bryde's whales. They
also say that the agreement does not prevent Japan and the other nations
from resuming unlimited whaling once the 10-year period is up.

"From our point of view, it's a whaler's wish list," said Patrick
R. Ramage,
global whale program director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
"It would overturn the '86 moratorium, eviscerate the South Ocean Whale
Sanctuary, subordinate science and I.W.C. precedent to reward countries that
have refused to comply by allocating quotas to those three countries."

"Rather than negotiate a treaty that brings commercial whaling to an end,"
he concluded, "they have created a system under which it will continue."

But Monica Medina, the No. 2 official at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration and the American delegate to the whaling body,
said that Mr. Ramage and other critics were demanding a complete halt to
whaling, an impossible goal, at least today.

"We can't stop it; we can only try to control it," Ms. Medina said in an
interview.

"If we can prevent thousands of whales from being hunted and killed, that's
a real conservation benefit. This proposal would not only help whales, we
hope, but also introduce rigorous oversight, halt the illegal trade in whale
meat and bring respect for international law back to the I.W.C.," she added.
"Are we there yet? We're not, and we have hard negotiations to go yet."

Despite a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling, the numbers
of whales killed annually has been rising steadily, to nearly 1,700 last
year from 300 in 1990, as the three whaling nations have either opted out of
the treaty or claimed to be taking whales only for legitimate scientific
study. Most of the meat from the slaughtered whales is consumed in those
three countries, although there appears to be a growing international black
market in whale products.

Some officials warn that if this effort at compromise fails, the
commission's efforts to police whale hunting, long crippled by
irreconcilable political divisions, will collapse.

"The I.W.C. is a mess. It's a dysfunctional international organization,"
said Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former prime minister of New Zealand and
chairman of the I.W.C. group trying to negotiate a deal. "I think this is
probably the last chance the I.W.C. has to cure itself."

Representatives to the whaling commission from more than a dozen nations --
including the three whaling countries and New Zealand, Australia, Chile and
other nations backing the compromise proposal -- are in Washington this week
to negotiate terms of the agreement, which would protect as many as 5,000
whales from hunting over the next decade, officials said. They said they
hoped that the reduced hunt would give whale stocks time to recover and give
negotiators time to write a new treaty that would bring an effective
international ban on all commercial whaling.

The group plans to release a new draft of the compromise proposal next week,
but it still must win the approval of three-quarters of the members of the
whaling commission at its annual meeting in Agadir, Morocco, in late June.

The Japanese, who killed 1,001 whales last year, are the linchpin of any
deal. Although the Japanese taste for whale meat is steadily declining, the
Japanese see their ability to continue to hunt whales, not only in their
coastal waters but in the open ocean around Antarctica, as a question of
sovereignty. Critics say that the practice survives only with heavy
government subsidies. But a single whale can bring as much as $100,000 in
Japanese fish markets. Japan is driving a hard bargain to demonstrate
strength at home and perhaps to use as leverage in other international
negotiations, officials involved in the talks said.

Joji Morishita, a senior official of the Japan Fisheries Agency and Tokyo's
representative to the whaling talks, said in a brief telephone interview
that he was not authorized to discuss his country's negotiating position.
But he confirmed that Japan was at least willing to talk about a new whaling
program that may result in a substantial reduction in its whale harvest over
the next decade.

"We are fully engaged in this process," he said.

Populations of some whale species have been growing since the moratorium
ended decades of uncontrolled hunting, but whales around the world remain
under threat, not only from hunting but also from ship strikes, pollution,
habitat loss, climate change and entanglement in fishing nets.

Under terms of the compromise deal, which is being negotiated behind closed
doors and remains subject to major changes, the three whaling nations agree
to cut roughly in half their annual whale harvest. That would result in the
saving of more than 5,000 whales over the next 10 years, compared with
continued whaling at current levels.

The deal also proposes that no new countries be permitted to take whales,
whale-watching ships would be monitored by the whaling commission and all
international trade in whale products be banned.

In addition, whalers would have to report the time of death and means of
killing of all whales and provide DNA samples to a central registry to help
track the end use of the dead animals.

Limited subsistence whaling by indigenous peoples in the United States,
Greenland, Russia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines would be allowed to
continue.

"Our goal is a significant reduction in the number of whales killed, but
some limited whaling will be authorized as a price for that," said Mr.
Maquieira, the whaling commission chairman. "This is highly controversial
and very difficult. I would prefer something different, but there is nothing
out there."



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