Dominica’s Support of Whaling Is No Fluke

Until five years ago, the 72,000 humans in this lush, unspoiled Caribbean island nation had just one interest in whales: watching them.

Derick Perryman, a dive operator who now helps draw thousands of American and European eco-tourists to the sperm and humpback whales that feed and breed just offshore, reckons that Dominica has “perhaps the greatest potential for whale watching in the whole of the Caribbean.”

So why has this cash-poor island paradise, which markets itself as “the Nature Isle of the Caribbean,” sent representatives to the International Whaling Commission, or IWC, every year since 1992 to vote in favor of killing whales?

That same year, documents show, the Japanese government started sending millions of dollars in development aid to Dominica--the beginning of a largess that has totaled more than $16 million. Since then the island has backed Tokyo on an issue that has long isolated Japan, as well as Norway and a handful of other nations: lifting the world’s decade-old moratorium on whaling.

And Dominica is not alone.

Documents obtained by The Times show that Dominica and its neighboring island states of St. Lucia; Grenada; Antigua and Barbuda; and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have received from Japan more than $77 million for elaborate--although sometimes ill-conceived--fisheries projects, technical assistance and other aid to those nations.

At the same time, each country consistently voted with Japan and against the U.S.-led anti-whaling coalition on key issues at the IWC annual meetings. At last month’s convention in Monte Carlo, commissioners from these poor Caribbean states stayed in lavish hotels for nearly a week and unanimously supported Japan’s bid to kill 50 minke whales a year.

“We’re not fools,” said one high-ranking IWC official who attended the convention. “We know the Japanese pay for these people’s membership fee [in the IWC], for their hotel bills--even for the limousines they drive around in.”

The measure failed this year by its narrowest margin yet: 12 in favor, 16 against and four abstentions. By comparison, the same proposal was defeated with just five in favor, 15 against and eight abstentions in 1990--before Japan began aiding the West Indies and encouraging their IWC membership. The group now has 32 voting member states and is open to any nation that pays to join.

Japan’s top diplomat in the region denied that his country is in effect buying the IWC votes. He also denied environmentalists’ allegations that Japan finances each island’s annual dues, which the IWC calls “contributions” and which range from about $28,000 to $150,000.

“We’ve created friendly relations with them,” said Japan’s Trinidad-based Caribbean ambassador, Yasuhiko Tanaka. “Of course, we talk with them and we ask for support. That’s true. But there is no direct link.”

The ‘Vote Game’

But one of the five nations’ whaling commissioners, the only one who agreed to be interviewed, acknowledged an indirect link between Japanese aid and the pro-whaling votes, which have enraged environmentalists across the globe.

Stuart Nanton, whaling commissioner from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said it is only logical that the nations would support their benefactor on diplomatic issues--especially at a time when U.S. aid has dwindled and Washington has crippled the islands’ banana-based economies by successfully fighting preferential trade deals.

Nanton, Tanaka and even the secretary of the IWC argue that environmentalist groups and the U.S. government have played the same “vote game,” using development projects, such as whale-watching seminars, and the threat of trade sanctions or tourist boycotts in an effort to win anti-whaling votes.

“What is reported to be done by Japan is not unique in any way,” said Ray Gambell, secretary of the Britain-based IWC, who added that the half-century-old body appears to be moving toward softening the whaling moratorium at its May meeting in Oman.

Of all Japan’s Eastern Caribbean pro-whaling allies, St. Vincent appears to have the clearest reasons for its stance. Because of long-standing local traditions, it is permitted by the IWC to kill two whales a year. The region’s last whaler lives on St. Vincent, a 76-year-old who says he hasn’t managed to harpoon one of the animals in four years--though not for lack of trying.

Since it joined the IWC in 1981, St. Vincent has voted consistently for whaling. The other four nations either joined soon after they began receiving Japanese aid or had unpredictable voting patterns until the money began to flow.

As for the recent influx of aid from Tokyo, Nanton sees no wrongdoing: “Naturally, we will discuss our needs with [the Japanese], and they will ask us to support them in international organizations, as any other country would do.

“But that’s not bribery.”

Environmentalist groups throughout the region disagree.

A recent detailed report on the subject by the Martinique-based Eastern Caribbean Coalition for Environmental Awareness charged the Japanese government with “trying to manipulate international organizations” through its development aid.

“The granting of aid is not challenged,” concluded the report, titled “Japan’s Strategy to Control the World’s Living Marine Resources.”

“What is queried is a wealthy nation’s use of developing states--countries with highly vulnerable economies--who are fighting for their survival. At risk is their independence, their right to vote freely and, more so, their natural heritage.”

‘Little Puppets’

The question of whether various whale species remain endangered after an 11-year moratorium that was never meant to be permanent is at the core of a scientific debate that is almost as intense as the political one. Every year, the IWC’s scientific committee gathers to weigh dozens of reports that attempt to assess the health of the whale population, which, by all accounts, has grown significantly since the ban took effect. For example, scientists estimate there are now 1 million sperm whales, but the species remains on the U.S. endangered list.

Although Japanese and island officials insist their IWC votes are in part based on those scientific studies, here’s a sampling of reaction from environmentalists and whale-watching tour operators interviewed throughout these islands, which have little more to survive on than their natural beauty:

* “We’re a nature island. We’re promoting ourselves left and right for eco-tourism, and every year we go and vote in favor of killing whales,” said Henry Shillingford, a lawyer and program manager of the Dominica Conservation Assn.

The association delivered a formal statement at the last IWC meeting that noted “with alarm the clear evidence of Japan’s overt economic pressure applied to our nation, as well as our sister [eastern Caribbean] states, to vote with them.”

“It’s absurd. It’s laughable,” Shillingford said. “But it’s very serious to us. Our image is being eroded.”

* “We look like these little puppets just being pulled along by the nose,” said Jane Tipson, a founding member of the St. Lucia Whale and Dolphin Watching Assn. who wears a lapel button that reads: “Plan for the future. Learn Japanese.”

“To me, it’s an embarrassment.”

* And Hal Daize, a pioneer whale-watcher on St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which is the only Caribbean nation that is still allowed to kill whales, added: “The whole problem in these islands is that we’re not really independent. We’re just little fish, and we’re just trying desperately to survive with all the bigger ones.”

The annual budgets for these islands are among the world’s smallest, and all are increasingly dependent upon an eco-tourism industry that is both fragile and hard to quantify, because most vacationers mix ecology-based pursuits with other activities.

One study cited by Caribbean environmentalists showed that 5.4 million people worldwide went whale-watching in 1994, spending an estimated $122.4 million in direct revenues and $504.3 million in total revenues. Direct development aid is far more concrete.

Against that backdrop, the islands are just as vulnerable to carrot-and-stick tactics from the other side of the whaling issue.

The United States, which has taken the lead in promoting and protecting the IWC moratorium since it took effect in 1986, has threatened trade sanctions against nations that go against the whaling ban.

Environmentalist groups such as the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare have threatened to launch tourist boycotts of islands that vote for whaling. It also has offered incentives to vote against it: Countries that supported declaring the entire Antarctic Ocean an official whale sanctuary--one of the most controversial issues before the IWC--have received financing for programs that teach whale-watching techniques.

Most of the same island nations that normally support Japan’s pro-whaling position either voted in favor of the sanctuary or abstained on that vote, apparently in exchange for the fund’s free whale-watching seminars.

Dominica’s Perryman is among the private businessmen who directly benefited from those seminars; they trained his chief whale-watching guide.

“In a way it’s hypocritical, but it’s a dollars-and-cents reality, especially for this country,” Perryman said of his country’s switching back and forth on whaling to gain aid. “The banana industry has gone all to hell, so there’s no money. Somebody comes and says, ‘Vote for me,’ and they give you some money.

“But if I were the government, I’d tell the Japanese, ‘Commit to us $1 million a year for 10 years to promote our tourism--something tangible.’ ”

“The point is,” Dominica environmentalist Shillingford added, “if you’re going to sell out, don’t sell out cheap.”

Aid Underused

The aid these islands have received from the Japanese is often underused and sometimes not used at all. A vacant fisheries complex the Japanese built in the north of St. Lucia, for example, became a center for illegal drug dealing. Contractors who built another facility in the south bulldozed trees that fishermen had planted for shelter.

And on one typical Friday morning at the Dominica capital’s ultramodern Roseau fish market, where the Japanese and Dominica flags fly side by side, there were just three customers and half a dozen bored vendors sitting idle behind the morning’s meager catch. The Japanese-built market, several vendors explained, was placed too far from the island’s fishing grounds and villages.

In principle, “the assistance that is provided is responding to real needs, in terms of fishing and landing sites,” said Yves Renard, whose Caribbean Natural Resources Institute is working to expand community involvement in the region’s development.

The issue, he said, is “in the form it takes, and the fact that the beneficiaries of these projects are not always allowed to participate in their design. . . . So what happens afterward is a problem of lack of use. They’re just sitting there, empty on the beach.”

Ambassador Tanaka said the projects were designed to help diversify the islands’ one-crop economies away from bananas, but he conceded that some of the projects were based on “misunderstandings.” Japanese specialists are now in the region examining ways to move or improve those facilities, he said.

But local environmentalists have gone a step further in criticizing Japan’s fisheries aid. St. Lucia’s Tipson said she believes Japan ultimately is trying to control the region’s marine resources to help ensure its own future food supply--a charge Tanaka denied.

Japan is the world’s largest seafood consumer. Those eating habits date back centuries. As for Japan’s taste for whale meat--the market that drives its pro-whaling position at the IWC--the United States is at least partly to blame.

“Whale meat has long been a part of the Japanese diet, but consumption increased markedly after World War II, when U.S. occupation forces encouraged whaling to prevent famine,” concluded a report financed by the World Wildlife Fund earlier this year. “Whale meat in [Japanese] school lunch programs during the postwar period into the 1960s and 1970s stimulated today’s demand.”

The taste for whale meat in the Caribbean has different origins. It is, in fact, confined to a single island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, an archipelago where whaling and an appetite for its catch was introduced by Scottish descendants in 1875.

Nanton, the St. Vincent whaling commissioner, has used those roots--and the fact that “indigenous whaling” has continued uninterrupted since then--to justify his nation’s pro-whaling stance and its two-whale-a-year exemption from the moratorium.

But it is unclear just how long that tradition will continue. And if St. Vincent’s last whaler, also the Caribbean’s last whaler, retires without an heir, environmentalists say it will justify lifting the nation’s exemption.

The Last Whaler

Athneal Ollivierre, a self-described “old man of the sea,” is in the eye of that political storm.

He said his uncles first took him out whaling 43 years ago, and that he spent the next two years learning a trade he calls “over-difficult, where you got to choose: I live or I die.”

Yet it is a tradition he religiously practices--harpoon in hand and shoulder rifle at the ready--every day during the February-to-April whaling season.

Each year, though, he has grown weaker. “Last one I struck was four years back,” said the grizzled Ollivierre, who has built a small museum in his house. “Only God Almighty knows” how long he can continue.

Ollivierre has been teaching one of his cousins as an apprentice, he said, but is unsure whether he will take over.

Asked how he stands on the political side of the whaling issue, though, Ollivierre simply pointed to the name of his boat--a 14-year-old, open-deck 27-footer he christened “Why Ask.”

*

Fineman was recently on assignment in Dominica.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Vote to Kill

Japan has for years sought permission from the International Whaling Commission to kill 50 minks whales a year. Despite shored-up support for the measure--including from five Caribbean countries that receive Japanese aid--it failed at last month’s IWC meeting. But the margin was the narrowest yet. Here is the vote rundown this year and for 1990.

1990

*--*

For Against Abstain Antigua & Barbuda Argentina Australia x Austria Brazil x Britain x Chile x China x Denmark x Dominica Finland x France x Germany x Grenada Iceland x Ireland x Japan x Mexico x Monaco x Netherlands x New Zealand x Norway x Oman x Russian Fed.* x Seychelles x South Africa x South Korea x Solomon Islands Spain x St. Lucia x St. Vincent and x the Grenadines Sweden x Switzerland x United States x Total 5 15 8

*--*

****

1997

*--*

For Against Abstain Antigua & Barbuda x** Argentina x Australia x Austria x Brazil x Britain x Chile x China x** Denmark x** Dominica x** Finland x France x Germany x Grenada x** Iceland x Ireland Japan x x Mexico x Monaco Netherlands x New Zealand x Norway x Oman x** Russian Fed.* x** Seychelles South Africa x x South Korea Solomon Islands x** Spain x St. Lucia x St. Vincent and x the Grenadines Sweden x Switzerland x United States x Total 12 16 4

*--*

Note: Some nations did not vote both years

Source: International Whaling Commission

* the Soviet Union in 1990

** means “for” vote gained