IWC – Newsletter Nº1
The commercial whaling should not start again!

More than 70 countries will decide the fait of the great whales during the following week, when delegates from all over the world gather at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) between the 28th and the 31st of next May in Anchorage, Alaska. Whereas the whaling nations, Iceland, Norway and Japan, press to restart the commercial whaling on great scale, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) and Fundación Cethus emphasize the fact that the commercial captures have already made too much damage to the whale populations, and that its resumption should never be allowed again.

Sue Fisher, WDCS’s antiwhaling campaign manager said: “the critical situation in which many of the whale populations are, twenty years since the moratorium came into force, and some decades from the beginning of whale populations protection, clearly shows that whaling is an unsustainable, uncontrollable and dangerous industry. We cannot take the chance that whale populations may be devastated again. The resumption of the commercial whaling must not be allowed. Let’s take this as an example:

Southern Hemisphere: The Humpback Whale was significantly diminished by the whaling. It is likely that more than 90% of the populations were captured, and around 200.000 whales were killed by the whaling industry during the last century in the Southern Hemisphere alone. In spite of the concerns on the vulnerability of some of the South Pacific populations, Japan is planning to begin a hunting of 50 Humpback Whales per year starting in late 2007, in the Antarctica.

There is not any great whale species that has not been severely hit by the whaling industry in the last century, and many of these mammals, of high longevity and low reproductive rate are still fighting to recover. Even so, the whaling countries continue pressing to put an end to the moratorium. For example, Japan has submit a proposal to the IWC to capture whales essentially Minke whales on the Northwestern Pacific under a new category of traditional whaling - commercial capture in disguised since it would mean the end of the moratorium.

Sue Fisher continued "Japan is trying to blur the distinction between the whaling allowed because of the aboriginals needs and the whaling with the purpose to obtain proffit, in order to leave the moratorium in the past.”

Japan falsely states that there are more than one million Minke whales, calling them sea cockroaches.  However, there are at least two different Minke species and many separated populations. Some of these populations are highly vulnerable, including one that could be the target of the new Japan hunting proposal.

The whales face many threats in the oceans of the world, such as habitat loss, noise and chemical contamination, climate change, fishing networks, boat collisions and hunting. WDCS and Fundación Foundation call governments to be against all attempts to add another threat reopening commercial whaling. Governments should work to address the existing threats that jeopardize the survival of the whales, not to increase them.

For more information:
www.wdcs-sa.org
www.cethus.org

Vanesa Tossenberger,
WDCS Argentina
Fundación Cethus