There has been a lot of interest in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting this week in St Kitts in the Caribbean. Japan has tried to focus the world on the original objective of the IWC which it claims is to “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry”.
Australia’s Environment Minister Ian Campbell has been leading the anti-whaling lobby, which wants a total ban on whaling. Almost every vote has bee reported here in Australia as either a win for us and the whales, or a win for Japan and the baddies.
There has been some discussion at my last blog post about who gets to attend the IWC and who gets to vote. There has been some discussion about the inclusion of many small island nations and also questions as to why Switzerland and Israel get a vote.
Clearly the IWC has members who have no real understanding of whaling and who could not usefully contribute to the conservation or sustainable harvest of whales.
I suggest the IWC be completely reformed and membership be limited to whaling nations, perhaps members of the World Council of Whalers.
The International Community perhaps through CITES would ask the IWC to present its whale ‘management plan’ each year showing how the agreed quotas are based on the best science and are sustainable.
In this way the whalers might be held accountable for their activities.
The world community would still need organisations like Greenpeace. They could bring to the attention of the international media nations operating outside of agreed management plans and quotas. They could name and shame nations condoning or ‘turning a blind eye’ to the harvest of marine mammal without a quota system in place.
The Australian government, for example, condones the harvest of about 1,000 dugongs each year. There is no quota system in place and this is estimated to be about ten times the sustainable harvest (click here to read a my OLO article on the issue).
This is the sort of unsustainable, and some say inhumane harvest, that should be brought to the world’s attention by organisations like Greenpeace and Australia’s Environment Minister Ian Campbell should be asked what monitoring and management plan Australia is going to put in place for the conservation or sustainable management of dugongs .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.