IWC

The history of whaling in the 20th century demonstrates clearly that whales need special protection from trade pressures. The relentless erosion of whale populations by the whaling industry in the first half of this century led to the formation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1946.

Greenpeace briefing

Commercial whaling has decimated whale population after whale population. The development of new technology in the first part of the twentieth century, such as the introduction in 1925 of the first factory ship, enabled the whaling nations to hunt whales in the vast seas that surround Antarctica. The same pattern of destructive over-exploitation that characterises all commercial whaling operations occurred in these Southern Oceans. It has been estimated that in the fifty years from 1925-1975 over 1.5 million whales were killed in total, the majority of these in Antarctic waters.