Japan to double whale catch

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.

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

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