Norwegian whaling - an export driven industry

Norway resumed commercial whaling in 1993 despite the fact that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on all commercial whaling had been in effect since 1986. The political party in government in Norway at the time took the decision in order to stem the decline in its popularity with voters in northern Norway. It was able to do so because Norway lodged an objection to the IWC's moratorium decision in 1982 and so is not technically bound by it.

Since 1993, the Norwegian authorities have been at great pains to portray their whaling as a traditional activity of very small scale, catching only minke whales, with the purpose of fulfilling local needs. In fact, Norway's minke hunt did not start until 1930 after numbers of other, larger whale species had already been massively reduced. The hunt was subject to weak regulations that did little to restrict operations. No catch quotas were set until 1975, more than forty years after this hunt had begun. Allocation of quotas to individual whaling vessels were not given until 1984, only two years before the IWC moratorium came into force and only at the insistence of the IWC.