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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: April 2008

World minke whale population may be only half previous estimate

 

SYDNEY, LONDON––Baited by a Japanese government allegation that the Australian government is hypocritical for opposing whaling while allowing dugong hunting, undisclosed Australian officials on April 2, 2008 leaked an International Whaling Commission finding that the world minke whale population is only half of the present estimate, reported Greg Roberts of the Sydney Australian.
“Australian government sources said recent research by the IWC put the population at between 40% and 60% of the 1980s numbers––between 200,000 and 680,000,” wrote Roberts. “The numbers are not necessarily lower because of population declines,” Roberts added. “ Earlier surveys overestimated the whale numbers in areas of pack ice.”

There are about 100,000 dugongs worldwide. Australia permits aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to kill about 1,000 a year for food––about the same as the number of whales killed and sold in recent years by the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research.“Many more dugongs are killed for food, drowned in fishing nets, or hit by motor boats elsewhere in northern Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia,” Roberts noted.

“Indigenous hunting is a pressure on the population that needs to be dealt with,” James Cook University researcher Ivan Lawler told Roberts.

The reported disclosure of fewer minke whales came amid a flurry of meetings preliminary to the annual IWC meeting, to be held in June in Santiago, Chile. More than 100 IWC delegates from 46 nations attended a mid-March gathering in London called by IWC chairman William Hogarth “to break the impasse between the pro- and anti-whaling blocs,” reported BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black. The session was chaired by Calestous Juma of Kenya, formerly chief administrator of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity. Other faciliators included Raul Estrada Oyuela, who chaired the talks that produced the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and Alvaro de Soto, who in 1991 brokered the end of a civil war in El Salvador.

“The priority for the anti-whaling Latin American bloc is likely to be establishing a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic,” assessed Black. “Japan has successfully opposed this proposal before, and might interpret its re-submission as rather provocative. Yet there will be powerful domestic pressure on Latin American delegations to secure the sanctuary.”

The IWC delegates passed a resolution asking the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society “to refrain from dangerous actions that jeopardize safety at sea,” barely one week after Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson alleged that he was shot at from the Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru.

Crew of the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin had repeatedly hurled bottles of rancid butter on the deck of the Nisshin Maru.

On March the whalers acknowledged retaliating with devices that they called “flashbangs,” which Watson described as stun grenades. Australian activists Ralph Lowe, 33, of Melbourne, and Ashley Dunn, 35, of Launceston, suffered minor injuries. Watson reported finding that a bullet passed through his Kevlar vest and stopped against an antipoaching badge pinned to a sweater underneath. The Institute of Cetacean Research denied that anyone fired a shot.

Before the IWC special session in London, the Japanese government “hosted a seminar on the sustainable use of whales that was attended by 12 African and Asian countries–– including landlocked Laos––that have recently joined the IWC or are considering doing so,” reported Guardian Tokyo correspondent Justin McCurry.

Japan has repeatedly been accused of exchanging foreign aid for small nations’ support at IWC meetings.

Solomons play for position

“Usually Japan pays for our attendance,” Solomon Islands prime minister Derek Sikua acknowledged to Chris Hammer of the Melbourne Age on March 8, after meeting in Honiara with Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd. Sikua told Hammer that the Solomons did not send anyone to the London IWC session because, “This time we have refused their assistance, so we can’t afford it.”

Rudd had just announced more than $40 million (Australian currency) in new aid to Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, and confirmed that Australian peacekeepers would continue their presence in the Solomons. The Solomons presently leads the world in exports of live dolphins for exhibition and use in swim-with-dolphins programs, but Solomon Islands conservation officer Jointly Sisiolo told an International Fund for Animal Welfare meeting in Auckland, New Zealand on April 2 that he would prefer to stop lethal use of marine mammals.

“I would prefer it to stop completely. That is my position,” Sisiolo said. “I want to see it stop, and to promote tourism. The Japanese,” Sisiolo added, “are going against how most of us Pacific islanders look at whaling. They kill whales. We are looking at trying to conserve them.”

Former Vancouver sea lion trainer Chris Porter, 37, and his Solomon Islands partner Robert Satu defend their captures and sales of dolphins as a sustainable non-lethal alternative to traditional dolphin hunting.

Porter “wants to build a resort where tourists can have ‘unlimited time’ with the dolphins,” reported London Observer correspondent Barbara McMahon on March 16, 2008. “He walks around the former Second World War Japanese seaplane base [where the dolphin export business is headquartered],” McMahon wrote, “describing overwater bungalows he will build on one side, a dive center and backpacker resort on the other, and a luxury hotel in the middle. At present, there is only a half-finished bar and dining hall and a few huts for the workers who feed the dolphins and acclimatise them to human touch.”

Earth Island Institute associate director Mark Berman has threatened to organize an international boycott of Solomon Islands tuna if the government allows Porter and Satu to continue capturing and exporting dolphins. The export business would create competition for Porter and Satu’s Solomon Islands Marine Mammal Education Centre, if it is developed as they envision.

IFAW data released at the Auckland conference showed that whale watching of various sorts is already worth $23 million a year (Australian) to small Pacific nations, with a recent growth rate of about 45% per year.

Participation increased from barely 10,000 in 1998 to more than 110,000 by 2005, IFAW said. About 1.6 million people per year watch whales and dolphins in Australia and New Zealand annually, IFAW found. The Australian and New Zealand whale and dolphin watching industry is now worth $273 million (Australian) per year.

Other whaling nations

Iceland, despite rumors that it might withdraw from whaling, is likely to authorize quotas of up to 100 minke whales and some fin whales, in a season beginning in May, Black of BBC News reported on March 13. Iceland, not an IWC member, resumed commercial whaling in 2006.

“We caught 45 minke whales last summer and sold them all,” Icelandic minke whaling association chief Gunnar Bergmann Jonsson told Black.

“The fin whaling company, Hvalur hf, is hoping that it will receive a quota perhaps as large as 150 whales,” Black added. “There is a very small domestic market for fin meat, and most of the 2006 catch is still in cold storage, but Hvalur is hoping eventually to set up an export trade to Japan.”

South Korean pirate whalers may have had the same idea. South Korean marine police on March 18 “arrested a boat skipper and two others in connection with South Korea’s largest-ever whale poaching case,” Agence France-Press reported.

The arrests were the first since police confiscated more than 50 metric tons of minke meat in January. The meat represented the remains of as many as 60 whales.

South Korean fishers are allowed to sell the meat of whales caught accidentally in nets. About 200 whales per year are reported as accidentally caught, but observers of the traffic“suspect about 400 whales are caught annually and consumed,” Agence France-Press said.

Whether there is enough Japanese demand to sustain much trade is open to question. Kenji Oyamada of the Asahi Shimbun, one of the leading newspapers in Japan, reported in February 2008 that Japanese sales of whale meat are “stagnant,” and that the Institute of Cetacean Research “is struggling to pay back its interest-free loans from the government.”.