Whaling Compromise Reaches a Dead End at Florida Talks
Image Source: Flickr. By: Michael Dawes.
The meeting resulted in absolutely nothing. No compromise was struck and nothing was agreed to, especially between Australia and Japan, who are clashing the most on the issue. Japan basically wants to be able to whale all they want because it is part of their culture. Australia wants the Japanese to reduce their quota to zero within a reasonable time period (approximately 5 years). Both nations refuse to compromise or meet each other halfway on the issue.
There is one nation that has yet to pick a side in the matter: the US. Since the US is a close ally of both Australia and Japan, it is hard for the nation to decide which proposal would be the better choice. Monica Medina, the IWC’s US commissioner, claims the US is at least supportive of a compromise, but only if it reduced the number of whales killed; noting that the US is waiting for an exact figure of the number of whales that would be hunted. Medina stated that it’s important to “look at the number of whales in the water that can be conserved under an agreement like this one”. She also explained:
“We don’t have numbers and so I can’t say that it would have achieved that yet. This isn’t anything that the US could support at this point in time.” … “It is a difficult decision and the US government would never take a position that would support commercial whaling or endorse it. But on the other hand, right now we have no way to stop it.”
The leaders of the IWC will be using information gathered from the Florida meeting to create a new proposal and submit it to negotiators by April 22. By doing this, they hope the nations involved will have a chance to review the latest proposal in full before the main IWC meeting, which will be held in Morocco in a few months.
By Heidi Marshall
I have been with GreenFudge for about a year now, but I've had a passion for Nature my entire life. When I'm not writing articles, you can find me out hiking, gardening, working on green craft projects, or taking photos for my website. You can check out the site at http://arkisaeo.com
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Tags: 1986 ban on commercial whaling, australia, compromise, Florida, International Whaling Commission, IWC, japan, meeting, moratorium, whaling
I think the US is a little more supportive of this ‘deal’ than this report suggests. One would have to ask what would they gain, but it could be argued that apart from the political peace with japan on this issue, the ‘deal’ would give the US a 10 lock-in of all its aboriginal subsistence quotas, and the hope that the issue of whaling ‘goes away for a few years’.
At this same meeting in Florida US scientists were also complicit in trying to drive through an unnecessary quota of humpback whales for Greenland, despite the fact that Greenland has not taken all the whales the IWC already allocates it to hunt, and has been increasingly commercializing its hunt.
As Dave implies, the deal ’stinks’, and simply rewards Norway, Japan, and Iceland for intransigence across a spectrum of conservation agreements. You can see a critique of the deal it here. http://www.wdcs.org/stop/killing_trade/story_details.php?select=540
Actually is it too much to ask Japan to actually honour all the agreements it has signed up -but broken with impunity? Like Law of the Sea Convention, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling Convention, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), and the
Convention on Biological Diversity, CITES.
Japan’s actions can be challenged by concerned states in the International Court of Justice or through the dispute resolution procedures of the Law of the Sea Convention and the conciliation procedures of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
No more talk -take them to the ICJ.
For the whales!