The South Pacific Sanctuary will protect the breeding grounds of whales whose feeding grounds are within the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, thus ensuring that whaling is prohibited on these populations where ever they might be.
Some populations of whales within the South Pacific Sanctuary were devastated by commercial whaling. For example, the humpback whales around Tonga were virtually wiped out by commercial whaling.
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.
April 2000: As the Japanese whaling fleet today offloaded its cargo of 440 minke whales hunted illegally in the protected Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, Greenpeace called on Japan and Norway to withdraw their proposals to resume international trade in whales.
Japan and Norway are aggressively lobbying other countries to support their proposals to overturn the international ban on trade in whale products at next week's meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), in Nairobi, Kenya (1).
Both Japan and Norway have recently claimed that whales eat so many fish that they are competing with commercial fisheries and must be culled for the benefit of fishermen. There is no scientific basis for these claims. In the past the oceans' ecosystems have supported large populations of both whales and fish. Global fisheries are in a critical state as a result of over-fishing, not over-predation.
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.
