JWA
PRESS RELEASE
FOR: Japan Whaling
Association |
June 13, 2002 |
Tele-Press
Associates, Inc.
321 East 53 Street New York, NY 10022
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT : Alan Macnow
Tel: (212) 688-5580 Fax: (212) 688-5857 |
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| FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE |
DOUBLE STANDARD, DOUBLE CROSS
Anti-Whaling Countries Torpedo Compromise Effort
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Hardline
anti-whaling forces at the recently concluded meeting of the International
Whaling Commission (IWC) torpedoed efforts by the United States and
Japan to reach agreement on the equitable treatment of traditional
whaling dependent communities in Alaska, Siberia and Japan.
For over 30
years, Japan and the other pro-whaling countries have supported requests
by the U.S., Russia and Denmark to provide catch quotas for native
communities in which whale meat was a traditional part of their diets.
Even when the IWC Scientific Committee in 1978 designated the north
Pacific bowheads as an endangered species, Japan refused to join Australia
and New Zealandfs attempts to ban catches. Japan insisted that
the Alaska Eskimos, the Inupiat, be allowed to take some bowheads,
though at reduced levels.
But Japan's
concern for the welfare of the American Inupiat communities was never
reciprocated. Although the IWC in 1993 resolved to "expeditiously"
relieve the social, cultural and economic distress eroding community
and family life in four small isolated coastal whaling communities
in Japan since imposition of the commercial whaling moratorium, the
US opposed every effort to relieve the situation. Even four years
later, when an IWC Workshop acknowledged continuing distress and recognized
that the four coastal whaling communities had more elements in common
with Eskimo whaling than with commercial whaling, the US continued
to oppose granting any relief.
The issue might
never have come to a head if the US and the other big power anti-whaling
countries had not tried to impose their will on every aspect of the
meeting. |
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Starting
on the first day, the anti-whaling majority stripped pro-whaling Iceland
of its right to vote 2 by supporting the Swedish Chairman's ruling
that Iceland's membership was impaired because it had attached a reservation
to its document of adherence. There is nothing in the International
Convention for the Regulation or Whaling (ICRW), the international
treaty establishing the IWC, nor in the IWC's Rules of Procedure,
that disqualifies a nation from full voting membership for adding
a reservation to its adherence documents. In fact, two member nations,
Argentina and Ecuador, had earlier adhered to the Convention with
reservations.
The next attempt
to rig the system came right after the anti-whaling nations failed
to get enough votes to pass wide-ranging whale sanctuaries in the
South Pacific and South Atlantic oceans. Attributing the loss to,
among other things, the failure of the IWC Scientific Committee to
endorse the sanctuaries, the anti-whaling bloc passed a resolution
which, in effect, instructed the Scientific Committee to ignore the
requirement to establish scientific need and to discount the mechanisms
already in place, or ready to be established, to protect whale stocks.
Passage of the resolution prompted the Chair of the Scientific Committee,
Dr. Judith Zeh of the University of Washington, to state that such
interference with the Scientific Committee would have forced her to
resign if she had to obey it. But as her term as Chair was ending
with this meeting, she felt an obligation to see it out.
Countries expecting
the IWC to carry out its mandate as a resource management organization
were further outraged when it appeared that St. Vincent and the Grenadines,
a small resource-poor Caribbean state, would be targeted for punishment
for supporting the sustainable use of abundant stocks of whales. The
small island country came to the meeting to ask that its annual catch
quota of two humpback whales be increased to four to meet the needs
of an increasing population. The IWC Scientific Committee, in evaluating
the request, stated that the take of four whales per year, from a
population numbering over 10,000 animals, would not have an adverse
effect on the stock.
To most reasonable
observers, a request to take four whales a year from a healthy stock,
to help feed a population of 116,000, did not seem in the least bit
contentious, especially when compared to the US request for 56 bowhead
whales a year for an Inupiat population of 10,000. Bowhead whales
were recently considered to be endangered and are now estimated to
number only around 8,000. The St. Vincent catch would be only 0.04
percent of the humpback stock while the Alaskan Eskimo take would
amount to 0.7 percent of the bowhead population, a percentage that
would not be allowed under the IWC's Revised Management Procedure.
But the standards
which the US and its supporters applied to themselves apparently were
not meant to apply to the small, weak countries. The US, United Kingdom,
Australia and New Zealand immediately attacked St. Vincent's request
and threatened to take away its current catch quota because the country,
under a new government in office only about a year, had not acted
fast enough to pass regulating domestic legislation.
Application
of blatant double standards to St. Vincent enraged the other Caribbean
states and the African and South Pacific members of the IWC. To ensure
against unfair treatment of St. Vincent, they asked that the St. Vincent
catch quota request be brought up before the catch quota requests
of the United States, Russia and Denmark. Had the big powers addressed
their concerns and treated St. Vincent fairly before proceeding to
the other allocations, the Alaskan Inupiat and the Russian Chukotka
tribes would have gotten their bowheads. |
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When
the small countries' request was denied, they then asked that all
of the aboriginal catch quota requests be put together and voted upon as one package, as the
US did when it was seeking a catch quota allocation of gray whales for its Makah Indian tribe in
Washington State. However, the big powers denied this request, too. Consequently, when the Chair
called for consensus approval of the first US-Russia catch quota request, there was no consensus and
the request failed to get enough votes for approval.
At that point,
the US asked for a pause in the meeting for negotiations to resolve
the issues. The small sustainable-use nations and Japan asked for an end to the double
standards and more equitable treatment of the people traditionally dependent upon whaling. The
US agreed that St. Vincent should be allowed to have a quota of four humpback whales per year
and that the term of the allocation should be for five years, the same term as given to the
US, Russia and Denmark. Later, the St. Vincent allocation passed.
The US also
was asked to allow an allocation of a small number of non-endangered
minke whales to relieve the socio-economic distress of the four small Japanese
coastal villages that were highly dependent upon whaling, as the IWC had promised in 1993. The Japanese
coastal stock of minke whales was estimated at over 25,000, a number much higher than the
North Pacific bowhead population of around 8,000. Japan reduced its request from 50 to 25
and pledged to remove all commercial aspects. Consumption of the whale meat would be restricted
to only those four coastal villages and the whale meat would be distributed free through
institutions such as schools and hospitals.
Unfortunately,
though the US gave assurances that it could persuade its anti-whaling
allies to allow a small non-commercial relief allocation, the outcome appeared
as a shocking double-cross.
When Japan offered its request as an amendment to the US-Russia bowhead
allocation request, the Swedish Chair immediately refused to let it be discussed and ruled
that it be removed from consideration. The Chair's action was so swift that it had to have
been pre-planned. But as a result, the anger of the minority was so great that the US-Russian
request again failed to get the votes needed for approval.
It's too bad
that the hardline anti-whaling majority of the IWC is more concerned
with the welfare of whales than with the welfare of people who depend upon the resources
of the sea. |
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