Subject: Case Study: Japan Whaling View
Michael Williamson (whe_william)
Mon, 5 Jan 1995 12:27:57
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From: Michael Williamson <WHE_WILLIAM@FLO.ORG>
Subject: Case Study: Japan Whaling View
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Subj: WHALING: JAPAN'S VIEWS, 1 of 2
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 1995 12:14:13 -0800
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From: Alan Macnow <amacnow@igc.apc.org>
Subject: WHALING: JAPAN'S VIEWS, 1 of 2
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FROM: Alan Macnow
Consultant, Japan Whaling Association
For participants in this conference who are interested in Japan's
views on whaling, following is the first of two articles by Mr.
Kunio Yonezawa, former Commissioner of Japan to the IWC, as pub-
lished in the Japan Times, 8 Nov. 1994:
FOES OF WHALING LACK LOGIC
For more than 20 years, whaling has been both an emotional
and a political issue. Science, logic and trust among nations
have, thus far, been the losers.
It all began as a political wrangle in late 1971, when the
secretary general of the United Nations Conference on Human En-
vironment introduced an agenda item to consider a 10-year
moratorium on all commercial whaling, alleging that all whales
species were threatened with extinction.
As I witnessed, and as documents in the United States Na-
tional Archives corroborate, this last-minute maneuver was, it ap-
peared, part of a grand design to divert the Stockholm Confer-
ence's attention from the mounting bitter criticism of the Vietnam
War.
The ploy succeeded and the conference adopted the resolu-
tion. The U.S. delegation then proceeded triumphantly to London
for the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission
(IWC).
However, this time, just two weeks later, the U.S. found
itself stunningly defeated by the ruling of the IWC's Scientific
Committee. The committee had considered the resolution and had
ruled unanimously - including the two top U.S. scientific aides in
Stockholm - that "there is no scientific justification for the
blanket moratorium."
Failing to prevail with this extinction approach, anti
whaling delegations gradually shifted their strategy to the more
salable one of uncertainty and inadequacy of available scientific
information.
This, they thought, combined with recruitment of new mem-
bers voting in their favor, would enable them to prevail. (The
number of IWC member nations mushroomed from 17 in 1972 to 39 in
1982. Prominent leaders of anti whaling nongovernmental organiza-
tions (NGOs) found it advantageous to seat themselves in many of
these new delegations as commissioners, spokesmen or scientists.)
When in 1982, they finally succeeded in having their
coveted resolution for a moratorium adopted, the moratorium had,
however, still never been recommended by the IWC's own Scientific
Committee.
The Scientific Committee's antipathy (or, perhaps, in some
cases, apathy) regarding the moratorium was particularly worth
noting in view of the radical changes in the committee's composi-
tion. Anti whaling delegations had placed or substituted
scientists of their choice, many of whom had quite dubious
qualifications. Indeed, what had been a small gathering of some
20 scientists had, by 1989, been turned into an almost unmanage-
able caucus of over 100 participants.
The 1982 moratorium resolution, premised on alleged con-
cerns of scientific insufficiency and inadequacy, mandated the
commission, through two rider resolutions, to undertake and com-
plete a comprehensive assessment of major whale resources by 1990,
and to develop a new resource management mechanism to ensure the
safety of these resources.
With these riders, the "victory" of the anti whaling na-
tions was bound to be short-lived. The completion of these tasks,
particularly the completion of the Revised Management Procedure
(RMP) in 1991, put an end to the perennial controversy over the
adequacy and reliability of data and analyses.
For the RMP, Japanese and other scientists put forward
five proposals, all of which proved equally effective. However,
it was ironic that the Scientific Committee decided to recommend
to the commission for formal adoption the one developed by Justin
Cooke, a British scientist known to be closely linked to Green-
peace. It chose Cooke's proposal for its relative simplicity in
application.
The RMP's comprehensive stock analysis also generally con-
firmed the scientific Committee's earlier conclusions, establish-
ing, inter alia, that the best population estimate of minke whales
between the ice pack edge and 60 degree south was 760,000. (There
are also a large number of minke whales outside this area in the
southern oceans.)
The completion of the RMP and the comprehensive assessment
came as a shuddering shock to the ultra-antiwhaling nations.
Among them, New Zealand was the one which, two months later,
rushed to Geneva to the third session of the Preparatory Committee
of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) to
propose for the UNCED agenda a resolution for a new 10-year
moratorium.
The document - by IWC commissioner Ian Stewart - was dis-
tributed at PrepComm. It described the reasons for the proposal
in a shamelessly candid way, warning that,"...the RMP might well
be adopted at IWC's next meeting in June 1992...(This would) un-
lock the door to the resumption of whaling....[I]t was not that a
majority if IWC members were necessarily in favor of resumption,
[but that] they were being driven by the IWC Convention itself,"
which would allow whaling under satisfactory stock conditions.
The proposal concluded that therefore the resolution at UNCED for
a 10-year moratorium was the only way to prevent this resumption.
In a nutshell, it confessed callously that after more than
20 years of fuss over science, they intended to renege on their
1982 commitments, and that all their arguments had been nothing
more than expedient devices for pursuing their hidden agenda.
New Zealand failed. France was next to move. It proposed
for the 1992 meeting consideration of the establishment of a
sanctuary 40 degrees south in the southern oceans. Although the
proposal was deceptively dubbed the Antarctic Sanctuary, it cov-
ered far too extensive an area to justify such terminology - vast
areas equivalent in the Northern Hemisphere north to a line con-
necting roughly Aomori, Lisbon and Washington, D.C.
In failing to explain why the RMP could not be applied in
this area, the proposal was nothing more than "a desperate attempt
by animal rights groups to prevent the use of minke whales in the
southern oceans." [Dr.Douglas Butterworth, associate professor,
University of Cape Town, "Science and Sentimentalism," June 18,
1992, Nature.]
Nonetheless, the commission did adopt this proposal at its
1994 meeting, amending it to exclude the exclusive economic zone
of the affected coastal states from the sanctuary - an attempt to
override the objections of Latin American countries. In the adop-
tion process, anti whaling delegations turned a deaf ear to both
of the Japanese proposals: one that the French proposal be
referred to the Scientific Committee for detailed computer
stimulation; the other that the sanctuary exclude from its ap-
plication minke whales - the smallest and the most prolific
species, and the one which, through exhaustive study, the
Scientific Committee had established was the most robust.
The absurdity of the French proposal is beyond doubt. It
alleged that the annual harvesting of 2,000-3,000 minke whales
from a stock in excess of 760,000, by a process the RMP would
detail, might well retard the recovery of other whale species and
interfere with the ecosystem.
Even the French delegate himself, when confronted with
these logical points at the 1993 IWC meeting, admitted in a plen-
ary session that the French proposal was more political than
scientific.
With all of this, it was inevitable that the government of
Japan would lodge a formal objection to the sanctuary resolution.
Japan did so in September.
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