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Iceland finally left the International Whaling Commission at its opening
session in Glasgow on Monday. The International Whaling Commission ‘is no
longer a viable forum for international cooperation on the conservation
and management of the whale population in our region’, said Iceland’s fisheries
minister. At the same time, Norway announced that it ‘will resume commercial
harvesting of minke whales’ next year.

Although conservationists had been expecting Iceland’s departure, Norway’s
announcement came as a shock. Cassandra Phillips, cetacean officer of the
World Wide Fund for Nature International, said it was ‘a clear breach of
the IWC procedures’.

Opening the 44th annual meeting of the IWC, John Gummer, Britain’s agriculture
minister, departed from his prepared speech to fire a shot across Norway’s
bows. ‘No country can make a unilateral decision about an international
matter and expect to be taken seriously on other international matters,’
he said later, a clear reference to the global environmental concerns of
Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s prime minister.

Gummer’s intervention gave some hope to conservationists, but he went
on to pour cold water on a French proposal for a sanctuary in Antarctic
waters. France has suggested that no whaling should be permitted south of
40 degrees South. This boundary effectively protects all the remaining great
whales around Antarctica.

Rather than offering to support the sanctuary, Gummer merely described
it as ‘interesting, inventive and challenging’. He said that the proposal
‘still needs a great deal of work done on it’, and offered to put Britain’s
considerable experience of Antarctic science at the disposal of those who
would have to do the work.

France’s proposal is one of the main items on the IWC agenda, and is
especially important because the other main item could lead to a resumption
of commercial whaling. For more than five years, the commission has been
struggling to devise a Revised Management Procedure (RMP) that will replace
the discredited New Management Procedure. The first part of the RMP, a system
of rules for setting catch quotas, has been unanimously agreed by the scientific
committee of the IWC. Preliminary indications are that the RMP would allow
a quota to be taken from some stocks of whales.

The French Antarctic Sanctuary would shelter most of the world’s remaining
whales even if the RMP says a quota could be justified on scientific grounds.
The scientists are not saying what the RMP would offer as a quota. ‘The
numbers are in the computer,’ one of them said, ‘so we can produce them
if we’re asked to.’

One reason for this reticence is to avoid playing into the hands of
Norway, which said that if the IWC refuses to sanction a commercial kill
of minkes in the northeast Atlantic, it would set its own quota ‘in accordance
with proposals made by the IWC scientific committee’.

The details of the RMP, especially the implementation and policing of
the agreed quota-setting rules, will occupy the IWC for the rest of the
week, along with the proposed Antarctic sanctuary. Whalers want a resumption
of commercial whaling, even if that means giving up the most lucrative areas
in the Antarctic. And conservationists must either accept the unwelcome
outcome of the improved scientific management of whales they have been campaigning
for, or find other reasons to oppose quotas for whaling.