World’s Whaling Police Float in Ocean of Inertia

For more than three hours last week, delegates to the world body responsible for the global ban on killing whales for profit discussed more efficient and painless ways to do just that.

Norway recommended its new harpoon-borne, high-explosive grenade fired deep into the whale’s brain, noting in a scientific report that 63% of the 625 whales it killed that way last year died instantly.

Japan said a .375-caliber rifle bullet in the whale’s upper spinal cord was sufficient, although its technical report acknowledged that only a third of its 389 “scientific” whale kills in 1998 resulted in instant death.

There was also some discussion about changing the name of the Humane Killing Methods Working Group, with some privately suggesting that the title was a bit inappropriate for an organization empowered by treaty to preserve and manage the world’s whales.

These were defining moments here at the 51st annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission as members of the 44-member body gathered on this Caribbean island at what many consider the commission’s most critical hour.

Deadlocked for years between powerful environmentalist forces pushing to expand the 13-year-old moratorium on commercial whale killing and pro-whaling nations that say stocks of some species have grown sufficiently to ease the ban, the commission itself is being pushed closer to the brink of extinction, critics on both sides say.

Proof of its paralysis: Little of substance emerged from the weeklong session when it adjourned Friday to change a status quo that both sides oppose. As delegates headed home over the weekend, Japan, Norway and aboriginal groups in the U.S. and elsewhere indicated that they will keep exploiting loopholes in the ban--and pursuing an all-out end-run around the whaling commission at a U.N. forum in Nairobi, Kenya, next year.

And the environmental groups that packed the conference hall with observers, news releases and propaganda said they will intensify their efforts to block Japan and the whaling lobby next year.

Japanese Aid Garners Caribbean Support

But the five-day meeting in Grenada’s sleepy seaside capital did open the curtain on the emotional and expensive human politics that have become the global debate over saving the whales.

For one, it brought into sharp focus Japan’s new alliance with Grenada and several other small Caribbean states, which consistently backed every one of Tokyo’s pro-whaling votes last week--as they have every year since 1992, when Japan began sending them foreign aid that now totals well in excess of $80 million. Those votes have helped Japan build a solid bloc of support after years of near-isolation on the whaling issue.

Mostly, however, the meeting offered a glimpse into a half-century-old institution that was created to “make possible the orderly development” of an industry that it has since banned.

This basic contradiction, both sides of the bitter battle warn, could mean the end of the commission’s sole dominion over whales as early as next year.

“The authority of the IWC is at risk as governments continue to tolerate a deadlock over the future of commercial whaling,” the World Wildlife Fund declared in a rare challenge to a commission it has worked hard to influence for decades.

The fund’s vice president for international policy, Richard Mott, added in an interview: “We think the IWC is an absolutely essential body, but the deadlock it’s in right now threatens its very existence.”

At the core of the environmentalists’ concerns and the whalers’ predictions of imminent demise for an organization that Japan asserts has been “hijacked” by environmentalists is the meeting next April of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a U.N.-mandated body known as CITES.

At the April summit, Japan plans to push harder than ever to win its bid to remove minke whales from the endangered species list, allowing its vessels to resume commercial killing and trade--without commission approval--of a species that now numbers at least 715,000.

‘This Is a Very Dangerous Time’

Concern over Japan’s strategy provoked what many here considered the delegates’ most revealing official act last week: a 21-10 vote endorsing a resolution that formally reminded CITES that the commission--and the commission alone--”is the universally recognized competent international organization for the management of whale stocks.”

The prospect of the whale debate moving to a larger forum also is a grim prospect for the environmentalists, who have spent more than two decades and millions of dollars successfully lobbying the commission into its current anti-whaling majority.

“This is a very dangerous time,” said Gerry Leape, an official observer for Greenpeace, which was itself the subject of a three-hour commission debate last week on a failed Japanese resolution to expel the group as eco-terrorists.

“Everything that is happening here this week has to be seen in the context of next year. CITES is the showdown,” Leape said.

But in the rhetorical war over an enormous animal that has become the icon of the environmentalist movement--but one that is still considered a dining delicacy in Japan and a staple in a handful of remote cultures--the whaling commission session is the traditional battleground for new strategies and spins.

Here in Grenada, the U.S. government’s 21-member anti-whaling delegation unveiled an elaborate show to back its new resolution urging the commission to devote extensive resources to studying the impact of climate change and chemical pollution on whale stocks.

The message: Global warming and toxic pollutants are a greater threat to whales than whaling. So none should be killed or eaten, regardless of how many there are.

Japan views such moves by the U.S. and its principal anti-whaling allies of Britain, Australia and New Zealand as deliberate attempts to divert the commission’s scientists from their principal task of estimating the relative growth of the global whale population.

Japan’s New Strategy: Blame the Whales

But Japan’s 41 delegates also had a new strategic twist this year.

They blamed the whales for the ocean’s endangered ecosystem.

The whale population, Japan claimed, has recovered so well after a 13-year moratorium the commission meant to be temporary that the whales are eating too many fish.

Despite the utter disconnect in and around the meeting, veteran delegates bristled at suggestions that the body is adrift.

“It’s not irrelevant,” said Michael Tillman, the soft-spoken science and research director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Region based in La Jolla, who has represented the U.S. at these meetings for the past 26 years.

“People tend to forget that there’s still whaling going on,” he said.

Explaining the logic of the debate on whale-killing methods, Tillman stressed that nearly 1,200 whales were killed last year by Norwegians, who defy the ban on the grounds that they refused to sign the moratorium; by the Japanese, who kill whales and sell the meat under the label of scientific experimentation; and by aboriginal groups such as Washington’s Makah Indians, who killed their first whale in 70 years in a drama broadcast worldwide in mid-May.

“We want to make sure these whales are being taken as efficiently and humanely as possible,” he said.

Of the Japanese and Norwegian whalers’ recurring threats to simply walk out--as Iceland and Canada already have done--and whale with abandon, leaving behind a commission that one whaler called “a social club for whale lovers,” Tillman said even that would be better than none.

“I firmly believe,” he said, “that if there weren’t an IWC, then you’d have anarchy on the high seas--a true free-for-all.”