Japan vs the whales

Seems as if there's been much more coverage of this in the Australian and UK media than here in the USA:

Japan has succeeded in buying the votes that will give it control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) later this week, in a major step towards bringing back commercial hunting of whales.

The pro-whaling nation has gained the support of three more small countries to give it a definite majority in the IWC, and so begin in earnest its attack on the international whaling moratorium which has been in force for 20 years.

Full story here. Yet as the Times of London notes:

JAPANESE whalers have been throwing away tons of their catches at sea because of a slump in consumption that has resulted in a vast whale meat surplus. . .

“The whale meat diet is becoming more and more obsolete in Japan,” the author of the report, Junko Sakuma, of the Dolphin and Whale Action Network, said yesterday. “The Japanese Government has long been blatantly (telling) the world that we need whale meat as a nation, but it must be challenged”. . .

In 2000, the wholesale price of red whale meat was 3,760 yen (£18) per kg; today the same amount of meat has halved in value to 1,900 yen (£9). An opinion poll four years ago indicated that 13 per cent of Japanese eat whale meat.

The same article points out:

• Japan has recruited 21 developing nations into the International Whaling Commission, including several Caribbean and East African countries

• The annual fees for a developing country were £21,000 until 2002, when they were reduced to £10,500 and then further to £6,500 this year

• Several countries have indicated that Japan pays their annual fees, including the Dominican Republic and the Solomon Islands. Grenada’s funding is under investigation

• Japan has also made grants of between $14 million (£7.6 million) and $51 million in fisheries aid to Antigua and Barbuda, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent

• Some landlocked countries, such as Mali and Mongolia, are members of the commission, although they conduct no whaling. Japan has been Mongolia’s largest aid donor since 1991, and Mongolia’s presence is thought to be a result of Japanese recruitment

UPDATE: By the narrowest of margins Japan's coup was thwarted -- this time.

Posted by David on June 15, 2006 11:42 AM