Japan faces stiff challenge in whale hunt vote
Date: 11-Nov-02
Country: CHILE
Author: Alistair Bell
"It will be tough, very tough," said a delegate from an Asian country at the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES.
Japan wants the meeting to allow a limited trade of meat and blubber from the minke and Bryde's whales, which it argues have become abundant again since the hunting ban went into force in 1986.
But opponents say whale stocks have not recovered and doubt that controls on the whale trade suggested by Japan would be right enough.
"Until countries want to talk about serious controls and serious mechanisms they shouldn't be returning to whaling," said campaigner Kitty Block of the Species Survival Network.
Unbridled hunting since the 19th century brought some whale species, particularly the blue and northern right whales, close to extinction. The ban was a product of the 1980s Save The Whales campaign, perhaps the most successful environmentalist push ever.
Delegates said the U.N. body was unlikely to approve the Japanese proposal because the International Whaling Commission, which introduced the ban, does not back a resumption of commercial whale hunting.
Japan, where whale meat is a delicacy, would need the support of two-thirds of countries voting at the 160-nation CITES meeting in a ballot due last week or early next week.
"SCIENTIFIC" WHALING
Japan has continued to kill whales despite the moratorium, taking advantage of a loophole that allows it to hunt a small number for scientific purposes. Meat from those whales is often sold, ending up in markets and restaurants.
The proposal to the U.N. meeting would in effect legitimize and regulate this practice, as well as allow trade with traditional whaling nations Norway and Iceland.
Shuya Nakatsuka, from Japan's Fisheries Agency, said there would be no return to industrial scale whale killing if the U.N. meeting backed its proposal.
"A lot of people raise the concern that Japan will circumvent the IWC moratorium and try to expand their whaling but that is not our intention," he told Reuters.
Japanese officials say their country killed 700 whales last year, including 440 minke whales taken in Antarctic waters. They point out that this figure is negligible compared to the overall number of the species.
Japan says there are some 760,000 minkes in the Antarctic but conservationists put the figure at nearer 300,000.
Norway exported a small amount of whale meat to Iceland in July in defiance of the ban.
Whale was an important protein source for an impoverished Japan after World War Two, but has become an expensive, gourmet food that can usually be eaten in just a handful of specialty restaurants.
Whaling is not economically significant for Japan but is more a matter of national pride.
"If the Indian people told Americans not to eat cow, they would be angry. It's the same thing. I think everybody can understand people don't like to be told not to eat what they like, I think it's cultural issue," Nakatsuka said.
He said another reason that Tokyo was making a stand on whales was because the CITES body has recently taken a tougher stance on trade in other marine species intensively fished by Japanese fleets.
