IFAW: Whaling meeting closes with uncertain future for whales

(Santiago, Chile – June 27, 2008) – The International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) 60th annual meeting ended today having achieved no new protection for whales and little progress in addressing the dysfunction that plagues the international body responsible for worldwide whale conservation.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and other animal welfare and conservation groups expressed concern that the meeting failed to address growing threats to whales – including increased whaling by Japan, Iceland and Norway.

“The Commission is trying to chart a course for the future while ignoring ongoing whaling by just three member countries,” said Robbie Marsland, Director of IFAW UK. “Whale conservation measures were put on ice at this meeting. If Japan, Norway and Iceland are serious about compromise, they should prove it by suspending their ongoing whaling.”

This week’s meeting focused mainly on the future of the IWC, with only brief flashes of conflict between pro-whaling and conservation-minded countries. This year a ‘no votes’ strategy spearheaded by IWC chairman and US commissioner to IWC, Dr William Hogarth, was meant to rebuild trust between opposing nations in an effort to modernise the IWC for the future.

The delicate strategy failed on Thursday when Denmark insisted on a vote to increase the number of whales Greenland whalers could kill as part of the country’s aboriginal subsistence whaling programme. Discussion of the proposal, which was ultimately defeated, sent the 81 nation members into heated debate.

Latin American countries agreed as a group to withdraw their proposal for a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary in the hope that it would be taken as a sign of good faith that they are willing partners working to shape the IWC into an effective agency.

While the IWC is busy sorting out internal bureaucratic wrangling, 1,500 whales will be targeted by Japan’s harpoons in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary and North Pacific over the next year, while both Iceland and Norway continue whaling in defiance of the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling.

Japan has long advocated lifting the commercial whaling ban and continues to exploit a legal loophole that allows lethal whale research, while selling the meat it derives from the hunt. The IWC has criticised Japan’s so-called “scientific” whaling programme for failing to produce legitimate scientific data.

Ends

For more information contact Clare Sterling at IFAW on 020 7587 6708, mobile 07917 507717 or email csterling@ifaw.org

Alternatively visit www.ifaw.org

The next IWC annual meeting will be held in Madeira, Portugal in 2009.