Media Release
Future bleak for International Whaling Commission
28 June 2010| Download as PDF - 352kb
The failure of the International Whaling Commission to reach a compromise agreement between the 88 pro- and anti-whaling contracting nations is extremely disappointing and its future is indeed bleak, Te Ohu Kaimoana, the Maori Fisheries Trust, says.
Te Ohu Kaimoana’s chairman Ngahiwi Tomoana and chief executive officer Peter Douglas return this week from attending the IWC’s sixty-second annual meeting held in Agadir, Morocco.
They praised the efforts of Foreign Minister Murray McCully and New Zealand’s Commissioner to the IWC, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, in attempting to broker a deal between the polarised factions.
“We praise the hard work and diplomatic negotiations carried out by Sir Geoffrey and Mr McCully. We are extremely disappointed they could not broker an agreement. Japan, Iceland and other whaling nations were hugely committed to the process. The fault lies, in our view, with recalcitrant anti-whaling members who refused to move from their unreasonable and unacceptable position of an immediate and complete cessation of whaling,” Mr Douglas said.
“We understand it the objective to end whaling in the Southern Ocean, but for Australia to think that can be achieved in one annual meeting held over one week is naïve in the least, and publicly manipulative and politically misleading at its worst.
“Japan wants to reduce its Antarctic operations. That was obvious through the negotiations. But when Western nations continue to resolutely oppose limited commercial whaling among Japan’s four coastal communities, it leaves Japan no alternative but to continue in the Antarctic,” Mr Douglas said.
Te Ohu Kaimoana chairman Ngahiwi Tomoana said too many Western delegations are dominated by the green NGO groups. “Most countries at the IWC can get what they want. But they need to stand up to the green NGO establishment to do so. If they keep pushing for the extreme version, the whaling countries will keep pushing back. But one day they will push, and there will be nothing there pushing back, and the international community will have no say in whaling operations,” Mr Tomoana said.
Anti-whaling countries and green NGOs cannot achieve their goals to end all whaling because the legal power at the IWC lies with the whaling countries.