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ENVIRONMENT: Vote Buying at International Whaling Meet?

Diego Cevallos* - Tierramérica

MEXICO CITY, Jun 19 2006 (IPS) - Around a thousand whales are killed each year with harpoons that explode as soon as they penetrate the skin, or with electrical charges of thousands of volts, or gunshots to the head. Japan is the leader in these practices and, in its zeal to maintain and expand the whale hunt, has allegedly bribed governments of small Latin American countries, according to charges by environmental activists and scientists.

The Japanese government has proposed lifting the moratorium on commercial whale hunting, in place since the mid-1980s, during the meeting of the International Whaling Commission, Jun. 16-20 in St. Kitts and Nevis.

The IWC delegates voted Sunday in favour of a motion from Japan that could open the way for a return to commercial whaling. Brazil and New Zealand expressed disappointment with the vote outcome of 33-32. Japan now has to convince 75 percent of the Commission’s 65 member countries to vote against the moratorium at a future meeting.

In exchange for the votes of several countries – many with no whaling tradition whatsoever – in favour of its position in the IWC, Japan allegedly has offered financial support and consultation services for fishing industries, denounce some activists and experts.

“This is known by everyone, and Japan doesn’t even try to hide it,” Jorge Urban told Tierramérica. He is a whale expert at the Autonomous University of Southern Baja California, in western Mexico, and has attended all of the annual IWC’s scientific committee meetings since 1986.

It was expected that the larger countries of the Latin American region, like Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, would oppose lifting the moratorium. But on the eve of the IWC meeting there was an alert that smaller nations like El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua might support Japan’s proposal to once again allow commercial whaling.

“Half of the countries that are members of the Commission want to end the ban and the others want to maintain it,” said Urban.

The international environmental watchdog group Greenpeace accused government of President Manuel Zelaya in Hondruas of succumbing to Tokyo’s pressures.

The Honduran foreign minister, Milton Jiménez, responded with indignation. “That is speculation and an intolerable insult. Any determination about this matter should be made by the president in consultation with his ministers, and that is not on the agenda. Honduras does not sell nor does it negotiate its votes,” Jiménez told Tierramérica.

Greenpeace “should identify its source in order to prove (that the country was bribed); we will make a formal protest if this speculation continues,” he said.

To the pleasant surprise of the environmentalists, at the last minute El Salvador and Guatemala reported that they were not able to join as new members of the IWC and would therefore not be attending the meeting in the Caribbean.

“Guatemala will not be in St. Kitts and Nevis, not as a IWC member and not as an observer,” that country’s foreign minister, Jorge Briz, told Tierramérica last week.

Nicaragua and Honduras, which are already IWC members, maintained an uncertain position. Although the Honduran government expressed offense at Greenpeace’s charges that it had accepted bribes, it did not clearly state what its vote would be.

The decision to restrict whale hunting in the 1980s was made based on evidence that several species were in danger of extinction as a result of over-hunting.

There are more than 20 species of whales worldwide, and scientists say some cetacean species are highly intelligent, with complex social systems and communication abilities.

Japan, Iceland and Norway argue that the populations of some kinds of whales have already reestablished themselves to a sufficient degree and that whale hunts could be reinstated without harm to the species. Those countries say, for example, that minke whales, the smallest of the baleen family, number more than 500,000.

The approximately 1,000 whales that are hunted annually are part of quotas established by the IWC for scientific studies and allow indigenous populations, like the Inuit in the Arctic, to maintain their ancient fishing and food traditions.

The Norwegian government is the only one to unilaterally break the ban agreed by the IWC. In 1993 it renewed fishing for minke whales, which measure some 10 metres long.

The Norwegian authorities say the moratorium adopted in 1986 should have been reassessed in 1990, but that did not happen because the majority of the Commission’s members were opposed, even though they considered that there was clear evidence of the recovery of some whale species, like the minke.

Japan, meanwhile, maintains whale hunts ostensibly for scientific studies. But the meat from the vast majority of the whales its fleet hunts ends up on plates in restaurants in that country or exported as an exotic product.

“Japan and Norway say they have the right to hunt whales, and they argue that they make use of the resource while maintaining it. That same right is one we have to state that the resource can be used sustainably without the need to kill them,” said Lorenzo Rojas, Mexico’s representative before the IWC.

Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico oppose a renewal of commercial whale hunting. Most Latin American countries have no whale hunting tradition, but several have developed a successful tourism industry based on whale-watching excursions.

Whale-watching generates revenues of more than a billion dollars a year around the world, contributing to an improved quality of life in coastal communities.

“The killing of whales cannot coexist with observation, and it has been proved that whale-watching is much more profitable than whale hunting,” said Roxana Scheteinbarg, coordinator of the Argentine non-governmental Whale Conservation Institute.

“Whether or not there is a large population, there is no longer any need to hunt whales,” she said in a Tierramérica interview.

According to Mexican expert Urban, the studies conducted by Norway and Japan that say minke whales can be hunted again without threatening the species are inconclusive.

The risk of extinction weighs on all of the big whale species of the Asian Pacific, like gray whales, of which only about 120 can be found in that region, said the scientist.

At sea, whales are killed by shooting them with a so-called grenade harpoon, which explodes upon contact with the animal. Poles that transmit high electrical charges are also used.

If none of the usual methods kill the giant mammal, the hunters use firearms: the order is to shoot directly at the whale’s head.

(*Diego Cevallos is an IPS correspondent. With reporting by Marcela Valente in Argentina, Thelma Mejía in Honduras and Jorge Grochembake in Guatemala.Originally published June 17 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)