BLUBBER BLUSTER

Members of the International Whaling Commission are gathered in Italy this week for the group’s annual meeting. As they have for years, commission members will have heated debates over a long-standing, but often disregarded, moratorium on whale hunting. Although it will likely not end the yearly squabbling, IWC members should be more honest about their intentions.

Conservationists, for instance, want the current moratorium extended. A moratorium, however, leaves the hope that the restriction will one day be lifted. A ban, on the other hand, connotes permanence. Whale hunting advocates continue to assert that whales must be killed so that they don’t consume other fish that are destined for the market. Recent research indicates this isn’t true so better reasons for allowing hunting must be given.

The IWC was founded in 1946 to control the international whaling industry to ensure that the large mammals were not hunted to extinction. At the urging of conservation groups, anti-whaling countries joined the commission and a moratorium on whale hunting was passed in 1986. The moratorium does however allow the killing of whales for subsistence catches by native peoples and for scientific research. More than 20,000 whales have been caught since 1986. Many of them are consumed by diners in Japan and Norway, by far the largest subverters of the IWC moratorium.

Now these countries are drumming up support for lifting the moratorium altogether. Spurred mainly by Japan, the pro-whaling lobby has gained force in recent years. Their numbers are bolstered by small nations like Suriname and Tuvalu that have recently joined the commission at the urging of Japan, which has provided aid and assistance to the tiny countries.

The 57 member countries should take a more serious look at the need for the whaling prohibition based on scientific evidence, not emotion. Representatives from new IWC member Suriname wondered Monday why whales, which he said eat four times their body weight should be protected when people in some nations are starving. Unless people from the South American country want to start eating plankton, such arguments are meaningless.

A study by Canadian scientists released Monday found that whales mainly feed in areas where there is little human fishing, such as the Arctic and Antarctic oceans and that they primarily eat organisms that humans do not catch, such as plankton, microscopic plants and animals that float in the ocean. Plus, whales eat four percent – not four times – their body weight in food per day, a considerable amount for a 100-ton animal.

Whaling and ant-whaling countries are, and will remain, far apart in their beliefs. The situation shouldn’t be made worse, however, by inflated rhetoric and unproven claims.