Politics rule whale-hunting issue
IT is estimated that over a million whales have been killed in the southern hemisphere throughout this century. As a result, seven of the eight surviving species are on the verge of extinction.
Even so, the moratorium on whale hunting established seven years ago, and supported by 38 nations, is in serious danger of being lifted this year.
There are only 200 white whales left out of an original population of 50,000, between Peru and the Antarctic. Hence the importance of the Latin American countries’ position at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Kyoto, Japan.
Brazil and Argentina support the upholding of the moratorium and the creation of the sanctuary. Chile has adopted a rather ambiguous attitude.
Jorge Beruho, director for special policies at the Foreign Office, has declared that, "Chile will not support the end of the moratorium unless the rules of the game are clearly defined and some sort of consensus can be reached on the matter." In other words, Chile’s final decision depends on others.
Juan Carlos Cardenas, who is responsible for oceanic ecology at Greenpeace Latin America, says the Chilean position "is highly incongruous". Only in March, at a meeting of the Permanent Committee for the South Pacific (CPPS), Foreign Affairs Minister Enrique Silva signed an accord aimed at studying the setting up of a protection area within the 320-kilometre exclusive economic zone between Colombia and Chile.
The CPPS was set up in 1952 to deal with a huge whale hunting problem: More than 300 trawlers, mainly from the northern hemisphere, were devastating stocks.
At the time, sovereignty extended only 19km from the coast, but after the Santiago Declaration, the coastal states, of Peru, Ecuador and Chile (Colombia joined later) established their right to the exclusive economic zone. It constituted a historical landmark, being incorporated by the United Nations into the Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Chile has no whaling industry. It ended in 1979 with a little known ecological crime that had profound international repercussions. The military dictatorship quit the IWC. As the Commission rules were no longer binding on Chile, the government allowed Japan to hunt freely in its territorial waters.
However, a trawler belonging to a whaling company in Chile caught and killed two white whales, the most protected of the species. The Carter administration In the US put pressure on the military to re-affiliate to the IWC, and so they did.
The incident acquires its true meaning now that once again, Japanese economic and political interests seem to be weighing heavily on the Chilean government’s ambivalent position.
Japan has replaced the US as Chile’s main trade partner with exports of US$2 billion (about RM5 billion) a year and a positive trade balance of US$740 million. Also, and most significantly, Japan has chosen Chile as a launching platform to penetrate further into the traditionally US-dominated Latin American market.
Japanese capital is flowing into Chile as never before and this, says Ana Henriquez, public relations officer of the Committee for the Defence of Flora and Fauna, "seems to be far more important than whales, which after all, do not provide much needed hard currency."
Paradoxically, they are not a fundamental source of income for the Japanese economy either. In fact, the whaling industry is quite marginal. One observer noted: ‘Japan’s opposition to the moratorium and to the sanctuary is nothing but an-other battle in the war being waged by the new power blocs."
Within these parameters Japan, Norway and Iceland have just set up a new whaling organization for the northern hemisphere that will establish hunting quotas independently from the IWC.
This makes France’s initiative of creating a whale sanctuary all the more urgent. The French proposal, supported by 17 other countries, calls for the setting up of a circumpolar sanctuary with a northern boundary of 40° south, having the Antarctic continent as its southernmost boundary.
The whale population is being affected not solely by depredatory hunting, but also by marine contamination and the increase in ultraviolet-B radiation, as a result of the thinning of the ozone layer. Recent evidence shows that plankton production —the base of the Antarctic food chain — is also being affected.
Cetaceans (the whale family) emigrate to the southern hemisphere every year to renew their feeding and reproductive cycles, setting up alongside penguins seals, sealions, petrel and other species a complex natural interaction that would be dramatically altered by lifting the moratorium.
Under Article VIII of the 1946 Convention, special hunting permits for "scientific purposes" can be granted to a particular nation. Since the moratorium began in 1985, the two main whaling countries, Japan and Norway, have hunted down more than 14,700 whales.
It is an open secret that the overwhelming majority of these have ended up in expensive restaurants rather than in a scientific laboratory. This is the reason, no doubt, behind Japan’s petition to increase its "scientific quota" from 330 to over 4,000 whales a year. — Gemini News
Source : New Straits Times, June 1, 1993
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