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.
Japan's agenda within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is self-evident - it wants a return to large-scale commercial whaling and is prepared to go to extreme lengths to achieve its goal. Unable to persuade the IWC to lift the current moratorium on commercial whaling Japan has, since the early 1990s, been openly operating a "vote consolidation operation"1 . The primary purpose of this operation is to recruit new member states to the IWC that will vote with Japan in favour of commercial whaling.
Greenpeace today expressed no surprise at the admission by a senior official of the Fisheries Agency of Japan, Maseyuku Komatsu, that Japan has been using overseas aid to secure support for its campaign to have the current international ban on whaling lifted.
The admission comes just a week before the start of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) conference in London (1). IWC countries already recruited by Japan through vote buying include six East Caribbean states, (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts and Nevis), and Guinea. Panama and Morocco have joined the IWC this year and are also expected to vote alongside Japan.
A special Intersessional meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) opens today in Monaco to "make further progress" on a Scheme that, if agreed, will take the world significantly closer to the resumption of large-scale commercial whaling.
The Revised Management Scheme (RMS) aims to establish a set of rules (including those covering inspection and observation) that would be used if the IWC agreed to allow countries to hunt whales for commercial purposes again. In the past, commercial whaling brought many whale populations to the brink of extinction - a fact which led the IWC to agree to an international moratorium on all commercial whaling, which has been in effect since 1986.
Less than two months after returning from its expanded North Pacific hunt, the Japanese whaling fleet has today set off from its home port of Shimonoseki towards the Southern Ocean Sanctuary where it intends to kill a further 440 minke whales.
At the meeting the two remaining whaling countries, Japan and Norway, will bitterly oppose the creation of a South Pacific Whale Sanctuary (SPWS) as proposed by Australia and New Zealand. Although the sanctuary has the support of all the countries in the region, the move may be blocked by the votes cast by the eastern Caribbean countries, all of which receive aid packages from Japan and all of which vote with Japan on every occasion.
