Japan to double whale catch

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Japan to double whale catch

 

By Bennett Richardson, Correspondent of The Christian

Science Monitor

Thu Jun 23, 4:00 AM ET

 

TOKYO - Japan announced this week at the

International Whaling Commission in the city of Ulsan,

South Korea, that it will more than double its

annual whale catch for scientific purposes in what

critics say may turn the tide against decades of

protecting the sea mammals.

 

Activists have fiercely condemned the move, and

antiwhaling Australia passed a nonbinding resolution

Wednesday calling on Japan to halt the program, which

is allowed under IWC rules.

 

While votes on various measures at the week-long

plenary have narrowly favored the antiwhaling camp,

the IWC may be on the verge of moving away from being

a conservation-minded organization back to being the

whaling regulation body it started out as in 1946.

Most resolutions have only been passed by a margin of

three or four votes.

 

More nations from Asia, Northern Europe, Africa, and

the Caribbean are now saying that the 66-member group

ought to be less concerned with protecting whales than

with promoting more hands-on environmental management

as some whale species have recovered.

 

Japan points in particular to a surge in the number of

minke whales. Whale researchers here have found that

minke whales have swelled by a factor of 10 in the

last 100 years to over 934,000 and are contributing to

the depletion of fish stocks around the world. Other

population estimates of the minke range between half a

million to well over a million.

 

This not only hurts the international fishing industry

" but also coincides with an alarming drop in numbers

of other whale species, " says Masayuki Komatsu, a

director at a fisheries research agency affiliated

with the Japanese government. He points in particular

to the plight of the blue whale, which number a mere

2,000 or so today. " If you do the math on the amount

of fish that minke whales require to survive, that

leaves much less food for the blue whale, " he says.

 

But he adds any increase in the minke whale catch will

have to be " handled very carefully " due to likely

resulting changes in the ecosystem.

 

However, other scientists dispute the dangers whales

pose to commercial fishing. Kristin Kaschner, a marine

biologist at Canada's University of British Columbia

in Vancouver, found that human fishing and whale

feeding take place in completely different zones of

the ocean, according to Agence France-Presse.

 

Japan plans to double its annual catch of minkes to

935 from 440 and add up to 50 larger fin and humpback

whales to the list within a few years under its new

scientific research program. The program is widely

seen as a cover for a limited amount of commercial

whaling by staunchly conservationist nations such as

Australia and New Zealand. Scientists from the

antiwhaling lobby refused to review Japan's new plan

in Ulsan claiming it lacked credibility, but didn't

submit any evidence refuting Tokyo's position that

some whale species have recovered, despite being

invited to do so.

 

While the IWC voted Tuesday to keep the 1986

moratorium on commercial whaling in place, the

expansion of Japan's whale catch is a bitter blow to

antiwhaling groups who argue the practice is

barbarous.

 

" There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea and all

commercial and scientific whaling should cease on

grounds of cruelty alone, " says Leah Garces, a cam-

paign director for the London-based World Society for

the Protection of Animals.

 

But countries like Japan and Norway see the opposition

to whaling as stemming from a combination of poor

environmental management skills and cultural

intolerance. Whaling in Japan dates back 5,000 years

and has a tradition of using the entire carcass not

just the oil and blubber, according to the Japan

Whaling Association. The association recently held a

symposium at Waseda University in Tokyo to encourage

young people not to abandon their culinary heritage.

At the meeting, advertised around the campus with

posters reading " It's OK to Eat Whale! " the head of

the association told students that it is important " to

always respect the food cultures of different peoples

.... as well as understand scientific facts correctly. "

 

The majority of older Japanese remember when whale was

served up in school lunches.

 

Whalers in resource-poor nations lost a lucrative

income when the moratorium took effect and while some

hope to return to hunting the giant sea mammals,

animal rights groups have recently been encouraged to

see more fishermen in Asia and the Caribbean trade in

their harpoons for dolphin and whale watching tour

boats.

 

As the influence of pro-whaling countries in the IWC

has grown in recent years, relations with

conservationists have understandably been strained.

The antiwhaling lobby has accused Japan of enticing

nations without coastlines such as Mongolia into

joining the IWC, while Tokyo says that Australia and

New Zealand pursued the same tactic with the

landlocked Czech Republic.

 

Many in the antiwhaling camp fear that whaling nations

will try to expand their influence to roll back

conservation-based schemes and lay the groundwork for

resumption of commercial hunting. Overturning the

19-year-old ban on commercial whaling would require a

three-quarters majority at next year's IWC meeting.

 

The 'research' debate

Japan claims that its whale hunts provide a wealth of

scientific information, including whale counts and

their impact on fish populations.

 

Conservationists, however, argue that Japan doesn't

need to kill whales to study them when tissue samples

can be obtained by darts. The research, they argue, is

just commercial whaling in disguise, as the whale meat

is sold.

 

Japan argues that the whales must be killed to

determine the animals' diet. According to one Japanese

study, half of the 75 species of cetaceans eat as much

as 87 million metric tons of fish - more than the

entire global fish harvest. But other scientists

counter that whales and humans rarely actually compete

for fish.

 

Source: Agence France-Presse