Whaling Ban Is Debated
A conference that could end a 15-year-old ban on commercial whaling opened Monday with delegates ready for a fight that pits environmental concerns against an appetite for lucrative whale meat.
Japan and Norway are leading an effort to end the moratorium on industrial whaling, approved by the International Whaling Commission in 1986.
They may have collected enough support to win a vote at the commission’s weeklong meeting, but some moratorium supporters accuse Japan of buying the votes of poorer nations with foreign aid.
Advocates of the ban say it is necessary to protect whale populations, which are depleted from decades of widespread hunting, against possible extinction. Opponents say whale stocks can withstand limited hunts.
“There are still so many threats to whales,” Elliot Morley, Britain’s fishery minister, said in a speech welcoming delegates to the commission’s annual meeting. “The world is watching closely to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated. . . . The vast majority of whale stocks have not recovered” sufficiently since the ban was enacted.
Iceland commissioner Stefan Asmundsson accused the international body of being “a non-whaling commission rather than a whaling commission.”
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