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ENVIRONMENT: Is Whale Conservation Negotiable?

Daniela Estrada

SANTIAGO, Jun 26 2008 (IPS) - Whale conservation organisations attending the 60th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in the Chilean capital have reacted cautiously to a decision by the organisation’s member countries to create a small negotiating group to determine the future of whales.

“The key political development (at the Santiago meeting) is that for the first time Japan has agreed to put scientific whaling on the negotiating table,” the Chilean commissioner to the IWC, Ambassador Cristián Maquieira, told IPS.

Japan has unilaterally assigned itself a catch quota of 1,000 whales a year, which it hunts mainly in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

A select working group, made up of 21 of the 81 IWC member countries, has been set up to deal with the issue, Maquieira said.

This will be the principal outcome of the 60th annual meeting of the IWC, held from Monday to Friday, he said.

The agreement was achieved through a commitment by IWC countries not to bring up contentious proposals for voting at this week’s sessions, although this is not completely watertight, warned the Chilean commissioner.

The IWC was created in 1946 by the signatories to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW).

Owing to overhunting of some species, a moratorium on commercial whaling was declared 22 years ago, which exempted native communities in the United States, Russia and Greenland that depended on whales for survival.

Only Iceland and Norway, which engage in commercial whaling in their jurisdictional waters, have contravened the moratorium, while Japan embarked on a controversial programme of scientific whaling in 1987 under Article 8 of the ICRW.

The “Buenos Aires Group”, made up of a dozen Latin American countries, was created in 2005 to promote non-lethal scientific research and whale-watching tourism.

The working group created on Tuesday includes representatives of whaling countries, like Norway, Japan, Cameroon and Benin, as well as pro-conservation countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

Representatives of these countries have been given a 33-point agenda for discussion, Maquieira said.

The first working group meeting will be held in September, and it is hoped that the group will present its recommendations to an inter-session meeting of the IWC in March or April 2009, he said. The 61st annual IWC meeting will be held in Madeira, Portugal in June 2009.

“There is a general idea of where we want to go (with the working group). As conservationists, for instance, we want to eliminate scientific whaling in the southern hemisphere. The crucial question is what we will have to concede in order to get what we want,” he said.

Japan, for its part, wants the IWC to approve a small whaling quota for four coastal fishing communities. “It is trying to blend a native community subsistence whaling quota with a coastal quota,” Maquieira said.

Aimee Leslie, spokeswoman for the non-governmental International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which proclaims itself independent of any government, political party or business group, said that her organisation does not support the negotiation process, “which implies giving a blind vote of confidence, because they don’t know what the outcome will be. In exchange for what would they be making concessions?” she asked.

No restrictions of any kind are being placed on the negotiations. There has to be a framework of conditions, the IFAW activist told IPS.

Leslie said she believes the decision on negotiations implies the loss of a unique opportunity to vote on the proposal by Argentina and Brazil to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic, which the five-day meeting is not going to do.

“Believing that a sanctuary would be approved just because the meeting is being held in South America makes no sense, because votes are not tied to geographical locations. The proposal would have got a majority of eight or ten votes, but we would not have achieved the three-quarters needed for its approval,” Maquieira responded.

“In all international negotiations, you know what the starting point is, but not what the end-point will be,” said the Chilean commissioner. “I don’t know whether the working group will be successful and be able to bring forward a recommendation.” If a proposal emerges, each country will have to evaluate it in the light of its own interests, he added.

But opening the negotiations means there is a chance that Japan will gain a quota for coastal whaling, one of the environmentalists’ fears, admitted Maquieira.

Both Leslie and Greenpeace spokesman Milko Schvartzman said that a necessary condition for the negotiations is that Japan should suspend its scientific whaling while the talks are under way.

Greenpeace is neither for nor against the negotiating process, Schvartzman told IPS. But since the working group has already been formed, he is urging Latin American governments to stick to their conservationist position, and he hopes for concrete signs of progress in the modernisation of the IWC.

“Several non-governmental organisations have decided to give their support to the governments, but not even the governments know how this is going to end,” Leslie said.

“There is frustration among civil society organisations, because we were looking forward to this meeting with high expectations. However, we must be flexible in the face of shifts in direction and understand that circumstances change,” Marcela Vargas, programme manager for the non-governmental World Society for the Protection of Animals, told IPS.

“Since the Buenos Aires Group has asked us to accompany them in this process, we would like to strongly request that they commit to ensuring greater participation by civil society” in the newly created working group, she said.

Maquieira said that formulas are being sought to include civil society in future meetings of the working group.

On Wednesday, for the first time in over 20 years, non-governmental organisations from all over the world, whether in favour of whaling or conservation, were granted a total of 30 minutes to present their views to the national commissioners.