Effort to Resume Whaling Fails

Japan and Norway failed to convince an international conference Saturday that, because whaling is part of their culture, they should be allowed some limited trade in gray and minke whales.

In secret ballots, countries attending the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species voted against a Japanese proposal to allow controlled trade of the gray whale and minke whale in an area from the Okhotsk Sea to the western Pacific Ocean.

They also turned down a Norwegian plan to allow limited hunting of the minke whale in the northeastern Atlantic.

Both countries have been pushing for years to allow commercial whaling and to expand the whale trade. The International Whaling Commission has banned all commercial whale catches, but Norway and Japan bypass the moratorium by exploiting loopholes in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling that permit them to hunt whales for local consumption and scientific purposes.

Both countries insist that whaling is an intrinsic part of their national heritage. Between them, they caught 1,078 minke whales in 1999.

The decisions still could be overturned this week when the measures go before a plenary session of the convention, also known as CITES.

About 2,000 delegates representing 151 countries are attending the 10-day forum in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital. The forum ends Thursday.

Both Japan and Norway said Saturday that they will not appeal.

“This is a big victory for nature,” said Kurt Oddekalv, president of the Norwegian Environmental Organization.

But Norwegian delegation head Peter Johan Schei called the defeat of his country’s minke whale proposal “small for Norway but big for science.”

“It is a very big defeat for CITES as a credible organization,” he said. Such decisions should be made on a scientific basis, not an emotional one, he said.

He blamed the defeat on unidentified “fundamentalist countries” that have decided, against scientific evidence, not to permit the reopening of trade in whales.

Delegates from France, the United States and Australia were among those who spoke against allowing limited international trade in whales.

On Wednesday, Norwegian whalers said scientific surveys show that stocks of the gray and minke whales were sufficient to allow limited hunting.

The World Wildlife Fund said in a statement earlier in the week that it was the job of the International Whaling Commission, not CITES, to take care of the management and conservation of the world’s whales.

“It is the IWC’s job to decide on the rules for the hunting of whales,” the statement said. “CITES is only concerned with international trade, and you can’t have trade before you have hunting.”

Norwegians eat whale meat as steaks or in stews but do not consume the blubber, which in Japan is a delicacy, eaten raw. Blubber oil is used in burning lamps, and the oil of sperm whales, when they were hunted, was used in making perfume.