With less than a month to go until the International Whaling Commission holds what could be its final annual meeting in Agadir, Morocco, the authors of a proposed "compromise" deal -- that would in essence allow Japan, Norway, and Iceland to continue whaling for ten years at arbitrarily set quotas -- have issued a press release protesting, among other things, that criticisms of those catch limits are unfair:
There has been criticism that the catch limits in our proposal do not have a scientific basis. In fact, the numbers are below, and in several cases well below, those that a group of scientists from both whaling and non-whaling countries agreed would be sustainable over the 10-year period, recognising that Scientific Committee’s extremely conservative Revised Management Procedure would be applied immediately where possible, and within the 10-year period, where not.
Blogging for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), the respected whale scientist Sidney Holt called shenanigans on that particular claim:
A reader would reasonably believe that the “group of scientists” referred to had some connection with the IWC’s Scientific Committee, which is the most authoritative body concerning the science of managing whaling and conserving whales. But not at all. It was a group chosen by the politically selected “Chairman’s Support Group” of a few Governments... consisting of eight members from the Government of Japan, one each from Iceland and Norway, and one each from five non-whaling countries.
Holt pointed out that even the principal author of the Revised Management Procedure, Dr. Justin Cooke, confessed to being initially confused by the draft proposal. In remarks delivered on May 6 to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Cooke said:
The proposal as written is disingenuous and I suspect that it will fool many people. It fooled me on first reading. The true nature of the scam only dawned on me after reading the text several times. And even then only with the benefit of many years of experience with IWC procedures, that enables me to relate such a text to how it would actually be implemented in practice. Those without the benefit of such experience will find it even harder to discern what the text really implies and to spot the scam. I consider the move to sideline the Scientific Committee and to sidestep accepted scientific procedures to be a retrograde step and to be very unwise.
The disingenuous elements of the proposed "deal" don't end there. The aforementioned press release claimed that, based on the whalers' self-assigned catch limits for 2009, the deal would result in 14,000 fewer whales being killed over the next ten years. But, as IFAW's Vassili Papastravrou pointed out recently, that doesn't exactly tell the whole story. Papastavrou, speaking at a briefing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building alongside actors Joely Fisher (from 'Til Death) and Goran Visnjic of E.R., pointed out that while catch limits have continued to climb, catches themselves have not.
For a likely variety of reasons, not least the attentions of Sea Shepherd, Japan is becoming less successful at reaching its quota in the Antarctic; Norway habitually abandons its hunt halfway through the season because the whale meat market there is saturated; and Iceland's "whaling industry" is essentially one obsessive man.
So why do the whaling nations raise their quotas if they can't reach them? Simple, said Papastavrou: for political consumption back home, and also to secure the best possible results from the deal. Keep cranking up those catch limits, keep bringing in proxy nations as members of the IWC, start screaming about "crisis" and "deadlock", and the next thing you know, you have most of the IWC's members essentially begging you to hunt whales for ten years.
The particular tragedy -- if that is not too strong a word -- of the whole deal? The fact that the very time that so many of the IWC's ostensibly anti-whaling nations have elected to cave, the point in the process at which they have decided to fold, is the very time their hand is strongest.
An unprecedented political situation is currently unfolding in Japan in which that country's industrial whaling is being regarded with increasing hostility by those people who are supposed to be its biggest supporters, as this recent piece in the New York Times pointed out:
... local residents are breaking long-held taboos to speak out against the government-run Antarctic hunts, which they say invite international criticism that threatens the much more limited coastal hunts by people in this traditional whaling town ... Other local residents said that with fewer people eating whale, the days were numbered for all kinds of whaling and that the government should just let it naturally disappear.
So, in a month's time, the IWC seems likely to accept a proposal to grant legitimacy to an industry that has been defying an international ban for a quarter century, that would use arbitrary catch limits to save the lives of whales that wouldn't be killed anyway, even as that industry is being deserted by its natural constituents.
And the proposal's authors wonder why they have to send out press releases asking for a kinder reception.
Images: From top, actor Goran Visnjic, IFAW scientist Vassili Papastravrou, and actor Joely Fisher brief staffers and media on the proposed whaling deal in the United States Senate last week. IFAW/M.Garcia.
Tags: Conservation, Whales
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