Cetacean bycatch victims displayed in Berlin, Germany, last month
Well the last vote has finally been cast at this year's International Whaling Commission (IWC), all the results are in - and there's good news! Last year's St Kitts Declaration, an attempt by pro-whaling nations led by the Japanese government to restart commercial whaling, was decisively rejected. Anti-whaling countries have bounced back with a 37-4 vote for the CITES Resolution, which strengthens the commercial whaling ban.
Last year's one-vote pro-whaling majority certainly acted as a wake up call. Although the Japanese government has spent a lot of time and effort to recruit new countries to vote in support of its position, the response from conservation organisations, like-minded countries and whale supporters all over the world ensured that the true opposition to whaling worldwide was reflected at this year's meeting.
Our contribution to this reversal of fortunes was to launch the I-GO/Defending the whales website and sign up 'whale defenders' to lobby countries around the world to commit to protecting whales. Peru, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Costa Rica and Ecuador all joined (or in some cases, rejoined) the IWC as a result. Nicaragua was even persuaded to change sides. And Greenpeace Japan also played a key role, reaching out to the Japanese public with its Whale Love Wagon site, which explored the whaling issue from the perspective of former whalers, people who still eat whale meat, and Japanese youth.
But it wasn't all good news. Much of the conference was taken up with Japan's Jarpa II plan, which aims to extend its 'scientific whaling' to kill 50 threatened humpback whales in the Southern Ocean each year. Although this was eventually heavily defeated, with 40 countries voting against the "Resolution on Jarpa", it left little time for debate on genuine conservation issues. The future of two threatened dolphin species, the baiji and vaquita, were given little consideration. And there was no discussion whatsoever about the estimated 3,288 cetaceans that have died as bycatch from fishing vessels worldwide since IWC 59 started four days ago, or through human causes like ship strikes, pollution, and climate change.
The final action of this year's IWC was for the member nations to commit to a special meeting to discuss reform of the organisation. As far as we are concerned 'reform' must mean modernization to deal with the major threats to cetaceans - of which the easiest to deal with is hunting. For the Japanese government it means something very different, and they have threatened to walk out and start their own whaling organisation if things don't go their way. But this is just posturing - the truth is that whaling is just not economically vital enough to them to risk damaging important international relationships over it, even now the pendulum has swung back in favour of the anti-whalers - where it belongs.
