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Eco Pre Meeting Issue 1
ECO Issue One ContentsJapan Takes Aim at Sperm and Bryde's Whales
Japan Takes Aim at Sperm and Bryde's WhalesThe Japanese government has thrown down the gauntlet to the IWC by proposing to expand its so-called "scientific" whaling. Next in line for slaughter are sperm whales, the huge and endangered species immortalized by Melville in Moby Dick, and Bryde's whales. This is on top of the more 500 minke whales they kill annually. Although commercial whaling was banned by the Commission in 1986, Japan has killed minke whales in the Antarctic since 1987 and in the North Pacific since 1994. Under a loophole in the IWC Convention, countries need only inform the Commission of their plans to kill whales for scientific purposes. The IWC Scientific Committee has regularly declared that Japan's proposed research provides little or no information that would contribute to the proper management of whale populations. And the full Commission has repeatedly urged Japan to refrain from granting themselves research permits for such whaling. Nevertheless, Japan has continued to kill whales and sell the meat commercially. Yet the killing goes on. Now the Japanese government is holding to shocking plans to expand the research by killing 50 Bryde's whales and 10 sperm whales per year in the western North Pacific. Japan claims it will survey the prey species and amount consumed by sperm and Bryde's whales, and government sources decried the "over-protection" of whales and the huge amount of fish they eat. Meanwhile, all the whale meat will be sold commercially in Japan. UK Fisheries Minister Elliot Morley called the move "a blatant act of defiance of international opinion" that would result in "widespread international condemnation." Australian Environmental Minister Robert Hill stated that: "Australia has consistently condemned the existing whaling program which has continued despite mounting international opposition. The prospect of it being extended defies belief." Japan is clearly setting the stage for a return to wholesale commercial killing of the great whales. The Antarctic minke whaling operation evidently isn't likely to provide the economic windfall the whalers want. Killing the larger sperm and Bryde's whales could bring a tidy profit. The Japanese must immediately withdraw this proposal, and ECO urges all Commissioners to oppose it in the strongest terms.
Blubber MountainNorwegian whalers are blubbering again, but this time it is about the plummeting prices for whale blubber. With prospects for export to Japan dashed again, the price set is 1 cent per kilo, down from 30 cents last year, and as much as $2 a kilo before the trade ban. Hundreds of tons of blubber have built up since 1993, reaching mountainous proportions. No one in Norway eats the stuff, though it's a delicacy in Japan. The aging blubber has filled up huge freezers, where it has become so old that much of it is inedible.
CITES Slams Whale Trade ProposalsJapan and Norway governments were dealt humiliating defeats in their efforts to legalize international trade in whale meat at the recent meetings of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Nairobi, Kenya. All their downlist and trade resumption proposals failed by large margins. Japan proposed removal of the gray whale from the protected list to once again allow international trade in gray whale meat. Their proposal was solidly defeated on a 40 YES/63 NO vote. CITES requires a two-thirds majority affirmative vote to downlist a species. CITES also turned down Norway's request to allow trade in minke stocks in the North Atlantic. In a further deterioration of their position since the 1977 CITES meetings, the measure did not even achieve a simple majority (52 YES/57 NO). Two additional proposals by Japan to downlist Southern Hemisphere minke and Okhotsk Sea/West Pacific stock of minke whales were similarly defeated. Finally, Japan and Norway's resolution to dissolve CITES' recognition of IWC as the relevant authority on whaling matters was defeated 31 YES/49 NO. Many CITES delegates privately fumed at Japan and Norway's strong-arm tactics and arrogance regarding the CITES proposals. In the end, countries went home in shock that their proposals garnered even less support than at the past two CITES meetings. Overheard in the hotel elevator after a key vote went against Japan: "Who gets to be the one to call Tokyo?"
Japan's Whaling Propaganda Goes Overboard--Along With the MeatThe Japanese government has launched a propaganda blitz in Australia and elsewhere to defend its outlaw whaling. A powerful international public relations agency is spreading misinformation, including mass mailings to residents of Adelaide. One of the deceptive claims is that the Japanese people have been dependent upon whale meat for centuries and that it is vital to the national diet. But the Japanese government is covering up the truth. In reality, there was very little whale meat consumption in Japan until after World War II. A handful of fishing villages historically caught a few whales by netting or harpooning - or salvaging dead whales - just as fishing villages did around the world for hundreds and even thousands of years. The few hundred tons of whale meat produced annually in Japan were only consumed by locals--there was no refrigeration or transportation to the cities. Until after World War II, there was no large-scale market for whale meat in Japan or anywhere else in the world. It was whale oil and whale bone that drove the hunt in every ocean for centuries. Indeed, Japan entered large-scale, deep-sea whaling not to feed its people but to finance its conquest of Manchuria and China. Professor George Small described Japan's motives for industrial whaling in his landmark 1971 history of whaling, The Blue Whale: "Japanese pelagic whaling began with the 1934/35 season, and by 1939 operations had expanded to a total of 6 floating-factory expeditions. During those years several international agreements, designed to prevent overexploitation of stocks of whales, were reached under the aegis of the League of Nations. The agreements included standard prohibitions such as the killing of the nearly extinct Right whales, suckling calves of all species, and females accompanied by a calf. Japan refused to abide by any of the agreements. Moreover, Japan refused to participate in the negotiations leading to the agreements even when for her benefit the North Pacific, her oldest whaling area, was specifically excluded. "The reason for the refusal to accept even rudimentary conservation practices was the urgent demand placed on the Japanese economy by the country's war in Manchuria and China. All the pelagic fleets sent to the Antarctic were owned and operated by the Nippon Suisan Kabushiki Kaisha Company, the main shareholder of which was the Manchurian Heavy Industries Corporation. This corporation was the principal economic and industrial arm of the Japanese army in Manchuria. The objective of the Nippon Suisan Company, as stated in the 1941 Mainichi Yearbook, was the acquisition of foreign currency and food supplies for the Japanese armed forces." Tens of thousands of tons of whale oil was sold by Japan in Europe, particularly to the Anglo-Dutch Unilever Company, which had developed the method of turning whale oil into edible margarine. Hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons, mostly from Germany and England, were purchased with the proceeds from the plunder of the whales. But what happened to the billions of pounds of whale meat from the carcasses of tens of thousands of blue, fin, right and humpback whales slaughtered by the Japanese fleet in the Southern Ocean? Not one pound of it was sent back to Japan to feed the so-called "need" for whale meat there. It was all dumped overboard! Why was this mountain of whale meat ditched at sea after the whale blubber was stripped off the whales? Because there was no demand for whale meat in Japan. Indeed, the Japanese fishing industry and farmers won a ban on whale meat imports from the pelagic whaling fleets, fearing rightfully that such a deluge of meat would destroy the domestic markets for fish, beef, pork and poultry. It was only after World War II when the ruined, destitute nation needed quick supplies of food that Japan began consuming large quantities of whale meat. The U.S. occupying force directed Japan to build new whaling fleets. Japan was to consume the whale meat taken; the U.S. took the whale oil in return for financing the fleets. By the early 1950s millions of tons of whale meat were feeding the Japanese people from the whale kill. The Japanese whaling industry became the largest in the world because it profited not only from whale meat, but also from whale oil after the U.S. investment was paid off. Japan led the final destruction of the last of the great stocks of blue, fin and humpback whales in the Southern Ocean. The carnage peaked in 1963 with more than 20 nations hunting the giant marine mammals. The International Whaling Commission, finally taking action, banned the taking of the most endangered species. By then, Japan had a strong economy and could afford to buy food overseas. The demand for whale meat dropped steadily through the 1970s Unfortunately, Japan's whaling industry evaded the IWC bans by setting up outlaw whaling operations around the world to hunt down the last hundreds of blue, humpback and right whales from land stations around the Pacific and with pirate ships roaming the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as well as the Pacific. Today Japan is an exceedingly wealthy nation that imports the best foods from every corner of the world. There is no longer any "need" for whale meat. Indeed, the whale meat from Japan's outlaw "research" whaling is a high-priced exotic delicacy. It is less than one hundredth of one percent of Japanese meat consumption. But the Japanese government deceitfully claims that whale meat is "vital."
Newest Whale Killer? The US NavyThe U.S Navy has been conducting experiments of a new array of towed high intensity sound generators to detect enemy submarines, leaving a rash of dead and dying whales in their wake. The Navy has routinely dismissed the strandings as coincidences, but that all changed with a new report from a respected Woods Hole researcher. Darlene Ketten, auditory specialist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, has determined that healthy beaked whales that stranded in the Bahamas last March had hemorrhages in or around their ears, consistent with the effects of a "distant explosion or an intense acoustic event." Ketten labeled the findings a "red flag" for the Navy's new sonar array. In all, sixteen dolphins and whales stranded on two beaches following the LFA experiment, with several being beaked whales. A total of seven animals died, six of which were beaked whales. The Surveillance Towed Array Sonar System Low Frequency Active acoustic system (SURTASS LFA) is still being tested, but the Navy is pressing ahead with plans to build as many as four arrays for use in the world's oceans. The array, towed by a Navy vessel, broadcasts very loud low-frequency sound pulses into ocean waters, and hydrophones pick up the echoes, allowing detection of underwater submarines miles beyond current technology. Marine mammals and other ocean-going species depend upon sound to orient themselves, find food, and interact with others of their species. What happens when their environment is suddenly subjected to extremely loud noises? The Navy itself has established a threshold of 140 decibels (dB) for their own divers; the LFA system is designed to emit 230 dB, a considerably louder sound (the decibel scale is logarithmic: a 20 dB sound is ten-times louder than a 10 dB sound). On May 11th, 1996, a NATO vessel experimented with LFA in the Kyparissiakos Gulf off Greece's Ionian coast. On May 12th and 13th, twelve Cuvier's beaked whales beached themselves along a 39 kilometer stretch of the Gulf. The circumstances were suspiciously similar to the Bahamas LFA/whale stranding incident in March 2000. Again, in March 1998, two humpback whale calves died after being separated from their mothers during LFA tests off the Hawaiian islands. The U.S. Navy and NATO have developed a frightening sound machine that can devastate huge swaths of the ocean without anyone being aware of the damages. Yet, these defense agencies deny any problems and are moving forward to deploying these lethal noise makers. Clearly, the IWC and marine scientists must intervene before more damage is done.
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