Eighty-eight concern nations will be meeting in Agadir, Morocco through Friday and will debate the proposal, put forward by the IWC’s chairmen in an attempt to break a 24-year deadlock that has nearly wrecked the global whaling regime. Three nations, Japan, Norway and Iceland have flouted the 1986 moratorium on the commercial whaling and continue to track and kill the animals, more than 1,500 in the 2008-2009 season alone.
Media report says the draft deal tables reduced annual catch numbers through 2020 for four species of whale as a baseline for negotiations, in the hope of coaxing the trio of renegades back into the IWC fold. Under the scheme, total allowable kills in each of the first five years would be just over 90 percent of the 2008-2009 figure, dropping further from 2015 to 2020.
Commenting on this situation the IWC’s own scientific committee says that these numbers are not sustainable. Based on populations of the whales scientists calculated that the proposed catches were several-fold too high for the western North Pacific Bryde’s whales, and double tolerable limits for both North Atlantic fin whales and eastern North Atlantic minke whales.
Scott Baker, a marine biologist at Oregon State University and a committee member since 1994, is of view that science has been sidelined during the negotiations. He says like Japan’s self-arrogated kill quotas for so-called “scientific research”, the new figures don’t correspond to a scientific reality. The proposal pays lip service to advice from the Scientific Committee, but the IWC has yet to adopt methods its experts laid out in 1994 — in a so-called Revised Management Procedure, or RMP — on how to calculate safe limits and verify they are respected.
Justin Cooke, a committee member from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), described the plan as a “sham.” He added that the scientific report also underscores the problem of so-called “by-catch”, the ostensibly accidental killing of whales in fishing nets. According to a recent study in Animal Conservation, a journal of the Zoological Society of London, revealed that DNA analysis suggests that the actual number of whales killed in the same waters by by-catch is likely twice as high.
