Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Iceland, one of the few countries that still wants to hunt whales, last
week threatened for the fourth time to pull out of the International Whaling
Commission. At the IWC’s annual meeting, held this year in Iceland’s capital
Reykjavik, the host country claimed that the commission ‘is fundamentally
´Ú±ô²¹·É±ð»å’.

Iceland’s threat came after the IWC adopted a new management plan that
will eventually allow its members to resume commercial whaling. But the
scheme does not allow whaling soon enough or on a large enough scale to
satisfy Iceland. The Icelandic commissioner, Gudmundur Eiriksson, rejected
the plan because ‘it is not likely to allow whaling in Icelandic waters
in the near future’.

The rules of the IWC mean that Iceland cannot formally leave for a year.
But Iceland says it will then ‘analyse all possible legal aspects’ of resuming
whaling in its own waters, outside the IWC, Eiriksson said. The US is likely
to respond to such a move by banning imports of Icelandic fish. Iceland
earns some $200 million annually from exports to the US.

The IWC placed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1982. The ban was
meant to last until the IWC agreed on a new, scientific method of calculating
the number of whales that could be hunted without seriously damaging whale
populations. The revised management procedure will replace the method of
setting quotas used before the moratorium, which led to serious depletion
of stocks of many whale species.

At this year’s meeting, five groups of scientists submitted proposals
for management procedures. The IWC’s scientific committee concluded that
all five would allow the commission to set safe quotas, although there were
greater risks attached to those that allowed larger catches. According to
computer simulations, all the procedures should maintain the populations
through 100 years of whaling.

The scientific committee recommended the procedure devised by Justin
Cooke, a British scientist working in Germany with funding from the International
Fund for Animal Welfare. But seven scientists associated with conservation
groups and non-whaling nations, including Cooke himself, opposed the recommendation.
They argued that as each procedure took different risks and provided different
degrees of protection, choosing any one of them was a political decision
that scientists were not qualified to take.

Cooke and the non-whaling nations wanted to incorporate many of the
‘safety features’ of a second model, developed by Bill de la Mare, an Australian
scientist funded by Greenpeace. De la Mare’s model gives whales better protection
in the long term. De la Mare’s procedure is also stricter about the number
of whales that can be taken from stocks that have already been overhunted.

The IWC finally voted to adopt Cooke’s procedure modified to include
some of de la Mare’s safeguards. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs will meet next March to work
out the details. The new procedure will probably take several years to implement,
partly because it requires an extensive new monitoring programme.

The whaling nations, including Iceland, Norway and Japan, opposed the
decision. Eiriksson said that the modifications were ‘an opportunity to
incorporate poison pills’ into the procedure that would prevent commercial
whaling anywhere but in the southern hemisphere. They would stop Iceland
whaling in its own waters.

The whaling nations asked the IWC to adopt Cooke’s procedure as it stands.
This is tuned to maintain stocks at 66 per cent of their estimated pre-whaling
sizes, calculated from whaling records. The IWC’s earlier quota system was
designed to maintain stocks at 74 per cent of their initial size, a level
then thought to maintain equilibrium. According to de la Mare, Cooke’s model
would allow whalers to take animals from stocks that have been reduced to
a third.

Eiriksson said: ‘We want a procedure that will provide a scientific
basis for the catch we think exists’. He made it clear that Iceland feels
it is safe to take 200 minke whales a year from its own waters, regardless
of any limit that might be set by the new management procedure. A procedure
which sets lower, or zero, catches in Icelandic waters would be unacceptable,
Eiriksson said. The country’s request to hunt 158 minke whales this year
was voted down by the IWC.