Cetacean crisis

Amidst the furor of the World Cup it’s easy for other news to slip under the radar and I’ll admit that I almost missed the shit-storm that’s been going down over the past ten days in St Kitts in the West Indies. This Friday, the nations that make up the International Whaling Commission will vote on a number of issues, and it’s almost certain that Japan and its allies will win a majority of seats on the commission, and pave the path for a return to commercial whaling. As The Guardian reports:

If Japan and its allies win a majority in St Kitts they will have the mandate they need to use the way the IWC operates to their advantage. Campaigners fear their first step would be to end the observer status of Greenpeace and other environmental groups. The pro-whalers would also be able to abolish the commission’s conservation committee and introduce secret ballots, allowing smaller countries to vote with Japan without fear of upsetting aid donors such as the US.

...Last month the foreign ministry convened a secret meeting of pro-whaling countries to discuss tactics ahead of the IWC meeting. An official in the ministry’s whaling division denied that aid packages had been discussed, but conceded that the parties had agreed on ‘logistics’ to ensure that poorer Pacific and African nations made the journey to St Kitts.

It’s almost certain that Japan has been using aid benefits and kickbacks to convince small island nations to join the commission, and vote for the resumption of commercial whaling. As can be expected, the conservation mob are up in arms about this and are urging people to start making a lot more noise. Indeed, if half the stuff Greenpeace is alleging will happen, happens, we’re going to see a very, very different approach to whaling in the coming few years:

First, Japan will propose to eliminate any consideration of protective measures for small cetaceans (dolphins and porpoises) from the agenda. Then comes ‘interference with whale research’, an item under which we expect Japan to call for Greenpeace to be ejected from the meeting because of our success in hindering their ‘scientific’ whaling in the Antarctic earlier this year. It was the Japanese whalers who deliberately collided with our ships and attacked our crews in open boats with metal poles, but they are claiming that WE were violent and aggressive. True there was violence, as grenade tipped harpoons ripped into one whale after another, violence we did our best to stop.

Although Australia has stopped short of a diplomatic confrontation with Japan, they have committed strongly to fighting against the majority. The environment minister, Ian Campbell, had this to say:

“I leave Australia this afternoon not confident of the outcome, but again confident that we’ve done more than has ever been done before to try to secure the conservation majority, but recognising that there is, as there was last year, some risk of defeat.”

The most bizarre part of this whole thing seems to be just how hard the Japanese government is pushing for this, despite very little interest from the general populace here. I’ve read several articles in local papers mentioning surpluses of whale meat due to large catches and poor consumer demand. This is despite a recent advertising campaign, “scrumptious whale,” run by the government with the aim of educating “a new generation of whale eater.” It turns out a lot of whale is actually going into school lunches and old people’s homes in Wakayama prefecture, and even into pet food.

There’s more at The Independent and the results of voting should be clear sometime on Saturday Australia time.

Posted in General on Wednesday June 14, 2006.