01 June 2007 - 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.
