Earth Island Institute

ECO: The environmental voice at the IWC

ECO is published by Earth Island Institute’s International Marine Mammal Project at the meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Madeira, Portugal, on behalf of environmental and animal welfare organizations around the globe.

For further information, please contact: Mark J. Palmer, Associate Director, Earth Island Institute, International Marine Mammal Project.

Japan’s Whaling – There’s Another Catch

Volume LXI · No. 2 · Madeira, Portugal · Tuesday June 23, 2009
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Important news. The scientific folks analyzing the Soviet true-and-fake catch data for pelagic whaling in the Antarctic in the 1970s (see ECO No. 1) have revealed falsifications in the years when the International Observer Scheme (IOS) was in operation.

That is when there were Japanese IWC-accredited observers on the Soviet vessels. It has also long been presumed that the Japanese meat buyers were aware of the Soviet trickery, because meat was regularly being transshipped at sea from the Soviet factories to Tokyo by refrigerated transport vessels, and they surely knew what they were buying, no?

But now the facts are out. So much for the sweet idea that the IWC should now go along with a deal involving arbitrary catch limits, and no scheme to ensure compliance with the deal!

Additionally, of course, the idea that Japan would agree to any proposed substantial reduction in its scientific “sampling” of minke whales and other species is dead before it’s in flight. This is business, for goodness sake, not science. They are already having enough difficulty in making ends meet, calling for bigger and bigger subsidies. Take a factory ship and some catchers all the way to the Antarctic just for a couple of hundred minkes and a fistful of fins and humpbacks? That’s not on!
– Dr. Sydney Holt

Korea Wants to Ignore Whaling Moratorium, Too

Volume LXI · No. 2 · Madeira, Portugal · Tuesday June 23, 2009
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Recent press reports from the Republic of Korea indicate that the ruling government is now pushing to remove the moratorium on commercial whaling in that country.

From the beginning of the secret negotiations between Chairman Hogarth and the Japan Fisheries Agency, NGOs have warned that any agreement reached would lead to other countries cranking up their own new whaling operations.

Indeed, at the Rome IWC Intersessional meeting in March, the Republic of Korea announced that it wanted a deal, just like Japan’s, to approve whaling.

Scientists have complained about the number of whales being caught “accidentally” as “bycatch” in fishing nets off the coast of the Republic of Korea. Last year, scientists revealed that twice as many whales were being caught offshore Korea as were being reported. The nets are particularly dangerous for the small population of Western gray whales, on the verge of extinction and likely numbering not much more than 100 animals in the world.

According to the Korean Chosun Ibo, the Republic of Korea will argue at the IWC meeting this week, “that whale meat dishes are part of the cultural heritage and above all, that there is a need to control the growing whale population for the broader marine ecosystem.”

Of course, these are the arguments used by Japan over and over and over again.

Perhaps Japan and Korea believe that if they repeat these false claims often enough, that someone will actually believe them?

Hogarth Deal Harpooned by Japan Whalers

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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Japan has (not for the first or for the last time) blown up negotiations conducted for the past two years by the IWC and the Small Working Group. And so, the “Hogarth Deal” appears at an end.

Background: Secret Dirty Deals

Almost two years ago, Dr. William Hogarth, an appointee of US President George W. Bush to head the National Marine Fisheries Service and voted in as Chairman of the IWC, began secret talks with the Japan Fisheries Agency to “solve” the “impasse” at the IWC between whaling and anti-whaling nations.

To the consternation of NGOs, the Hogarth Deal was predicated on allowing Japan to legally kill whales in their home waters (so-called Cultural Coastal Whaling), a long-term goal of Japan’s Fisheries Agency, in exchange for supposedly reducing Japan’s killing of whales under scientific permit in the Antarctic. Allowing Japan Coastal Whaling would mean an end to the 20-year-old moratorium on commercial whaling. Furthermore, the Hogarth Deal did not do anything about other nations’ illegal whaling – Iceland and Norway commercially kill whales in defiance of the moratorium, and South Korea expressed interest in resuming commercial whaling and getting their own deal with the IWC, as likely would some other nations. On top of that, Japan’s Fisheries Agency already issues annual permits to kill 23,000 dolphins in Japan’s waters. Size doesn’t matter – killing dolphins is coastal whaling!

This deal was totally unacceptable, but NGOs were not in the room with the secret negotiators.

Rome Intersessional

The “Hogarth Deal” was finally made public during an intersessional meeting of the IWC in March in Rome. But the deal had zero specificity. It stated that Japan would conduct coastal commercial whaling, but provided no numbers of whales that they would slaughter. Furthermore, there were no numbers at all on how many whales Japan would continue to slaughter in the Southern Ocean.

Instead, two options were offered, one that stated scientific whaling would be reduced by an unspecified number in the Southern Ocean, and another that such scientific whaling would be phased out entirely. But Japan’s Fisheries Minister, before the Rome meeting even got started, came out stating that Japan would never end scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean. Reportedly, the IWC Small Working Group of nations doing the actual closed-door negotiations met right after the Rome meeting and could not reach any new decisions for more specificity.

Hogarth Deal Explodes in Secret

Rumor is that just two months ago, the Small Working Group of the IWC convened once again in San Francisco to finalize the Hogarth Deal, due to be made public on May 18th and voted into effect during the current June 22-26 IWC meeting in Madeira.

At the meeting, Japan, to participant’s amazement, brought out their list of numbers of whales they expected to kill under the Hogarth Deal. The other nations were astonished at the Japan Fisheries Agency’s audacity in the shear bloodshed they were contemplating. Essentially, they proposed to kill virtually the same number of whales in the Southern Ocean that they had killed last season - no significant reduction in whaling, while the coastal slaughter would be legalized, too. The Hogarth Deal could not be agreed to by anyone.

This was followed by the European Union agreeing to vote as a bloc at the IWC, pushing for an end to scientific whaling and maintaining the moratorium on commercial whaling. Japan, in retaliation, completed their own meeting of its (well-paid) client countries, and announced they too would vote as a bloc at the IWC meeting. Voting in blocs will preclude the consensus to sell-out the whales sought by Chairman Hogarth for the past two years.

Japan’s Strategy

It is very clear what Japan’s strategy is now. Of course, they never intended to work out any compromise that would curtail their whaling efforts. Japan is intent on expanding its whaling, purely for ideological reasons. (Whale meat in Japan is not selling, and the entire “industry” is now completely subsidized by Japanese taxpayers.)

The Japan Fisheries Agency waited until the last minute to deliberately end the negotiations in secret. This will allow the Japanese Fisheries Agency, surrounded by their well-bribed client nations, to cry “poor me” at the upcoming public meetings of the IWC in Madeira, claiming rich countries are to blame for not supporting Japan and conducting cultural and racial discrimination against Japan.

And of course, Japan will continue to kill whales, trade in whale meat, and likely expand their killing effort to include humpback whales in the Southern Ocean.

Once again, the Bush Administration’s sorry record of botched international negotiations have completely and utterly back-fired, resulting in far more damage to the US than if the US had been totally straight in the first place.

However, this is not the final end of the “Hogarth Deal.” William Hogarth, a Bush appointee, is still head of the US delegation, is still Chairman of the IWC, and still wants a deal - likely any deal at this point. Like Dr. Frankenstein, you can be sure negotiators are feverishly trying to revive the “Hogarth Deal” so it can be ready to pass regardless of how many whales are sacrificed.

One does not need to be Nostradamus to understand that the Japanese Fisheries Agency has repeatedly negotiated in bad faith at the IWC and will do so again.

Japan’s Whaling – There’s a Catch

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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Most readers of ECO will, I imagine, know about papers published recently by P. Clapham and co-authors following up the revelations by Alexey V. Yablokov in the mid-1990s with other Russian and Ukrainian scientists on the falsification on a huge scale of statistics of whale catches in the Soviet period. An English translation of a remarkable manuscript by the eminent Russian scientist, the late Dr Fred Berzin, detailing some of these transgressions during the history of Soviet whaling, has also recently been published.

Fewer will be aware that Japan has a history of falsifying the catch statistics of “small-type whaling”, large-type baleen and sperm whaling from land-stations, but no data have published regarding the catches reported by pelagic expeditions. This is all detailed in seven published papers by several authors, both Japanese and foreign. Because the Revised Management Procedure, accepted by the Commission but not yet implemented, relies on catch data, the under-reporting of past catches leads inevitably to unjustifiably higher catch limits calculated by using it. This is not a mere historical footnote; past falsifications will thus affect any temporary catch limits that might be set under various “deals” being discussed by some officials and governments.

This should make it entirely unacceptable that discussions have been held in and around the IWC’s Small Working Group, which envisaged, among other things, granting Japan arbitrary catch limits for some species in the NW Pacific in return for some hypothetical limitation of Japan’s expansion of “scientific whaling” in the Antarctic. Regardless of any desire to make the IWC “functional” again, it should be unthinkable that, at this time in the negotiation of conservation measures for the great whales, any catch limits could be contemplated without a full compliance regime being locked in place. In particular, that this should be done without at least applying the agreed, if not formally adopted, Revised Management Procedure (RMP) for baleen whales for the calculation of appropriate precautionary numbers, even on a provisional basis. And, by the way, throughout the entire history of the IWC’s ineffective management of whaling, numbers labeled as “provisional” have without exception mutated into “repeated” and “continuing”.

References:

“The Truth about Soviet Whaling: A Memoir” by Alfred A. Berzin. Translated by Yulia Ivashchenko. Marine Fisheries Review (NOAA, USA) Special Issue 70(2): 1-59, 2008.

“A Whale of a Deception” by P. Clapham and Y. Ivashchenko. Marine Fisheries Review 71: 44-52, 2009.

“Catches of Humpback Whales by the Soviet Union and other nations in the Southern Ocean, 1947-1973” by P. Clapham et al, Marine Fisheries Review 71: 39-43, 2009.

A series of papers by various authors, including T. Kasuya, R. L. Brownell Jr, H. Kato, K. C. Balcomb III, C. A. Goebel, I. Kondo and S. Ohsumi, most of which have been published by IWC or were made available to the Scientific Committee and are in the IWC archive as submitted documents considered in the context of Comprehensive Assessments.

– Dr. Sidney Holt

More Whale Meat Going to Japan

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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Trade in whale meat is not authorized either by the IWC nor CITES, but the trade continues, nonetheless.

Like the expansion of so-called “scientific” whaling, the trade in whale meat is escalating. And Japan, not surprisingly, is the global importer of all those dead whales.

Trade in whale meat must be stopped, or the devastating erosion of the IWC’s authority will continue.

A Little Bit of History

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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This year, with the IWC navel-gazing, seeking its more functional future, may be time for a little bit of history:

I was recently honored by several hundred participants at the First International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas, held in Maui, Hawaii, 30/3-3/4 2009, as “The Father of MPAs for Cetaceans”. I thought that was a bit over the top! The real Granddaddy was an eminent international lawyer, an Argentinean, Sr. José Leon Su‡rez. This year is the eightieth Anniversary of his proposal to the League of Nations that a large Sanctuary for the Great Whales be established in the Antarctic zone of the Southern Ocean.

Ten years later all whaling nations except Japan had recognized this need, but the necessary legal provision had to await the end of the Second World War, when it was incorporated in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946. The first meeting of the IWC was held in 1949, that is twenty years after Su‡rez, and a part of his dream was fulfilled when The Sanctuary for baleen whales in the Southeastern Pacific sector was incorporated in the original Schedule to the ICRW. When Japan entered the IWC, in 1950, its delegation immediately began lobbying for the abolition of The Sanctuary (and it has continued to press for the abolition of ALL sanctuaries). The limited protection it had given from pelagic factory-ship whaling was suspended one year after another and finally abolished in 1955.

So 2009 is not a bad year to be celebrating multi-decadal anniversaries of MPAs for whales. It is the thirtieth anniversary of the IUCN Workshop on Cetacean Sanctuaries, held in Mexico, which was quickly followed by the IWC’s “delivery” of the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, in 1979. Dr Lyall Watson, Alternate IWC Commissioner for the Republic of Seychelles, was a co-parent of that pregnancy, which was a lot shorter than that needed to produce a whale calf. And the IOWS had a whole raft of midwives and foster parents among whom President Albert René of Seychelles, Sir Peter Scott, Dr Silvia Earle and Prince Shahram Palhavi-nia of Iran were prominent. It took another 15 years to complete the 1979 action by extending sanctuary southward from 55¡S to the Antarctic ice-edge.

After this meeting of the IWC in Madeira, the IOWS anniversary is being celebrated at an international Indian Ocean Whale Symposium being held in The Maldives, 18-20 July. Dr Charles Anderson is the driving force of this event and Chair of the IOCS Convening Committee. I have contributed a keynote account of the details of the 1979 action. – Dr. Sidney Holt

Japan Sells Protected Minke Whale Meat

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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A new report out demonstrates that substantial amounts of meat from the supposedly protected J Stock of minke whales is being sold in Japanese markets.

This is the same stock of minke whales that the government of Japan has pushed for years to open up commercial “small-type coastal” whaling.

In a paper presented to the Scientific Committee last week, V. Lukoschek and his co-authors sampled whale meat in stores in Japan, finding that fully 44% of the meat sampled comes from the J Stock of minke whales, ostensibly protected since 1986. A separate analysis suggested as much as 46.1% of all minke whale meat sampled in stores comes from the depleted J Stock.

The scientists estimated that, while some “bycatch” of J Stock minke whales are used for food, far more minke whales from this stock were being killed than reported.

This illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) kill of minke whales raises grave doubts about current protection efforts for the J Stock and further undermines the Japanese claims that a “small-type coastal” commercial hunt of minke can be conducted by the Japanese government without further harming the J Stock status.

Japan: No Good Faith

Volume LXI · No. 1 · Madeira, Portugal · Monday June 22, 2009
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During the past two years of negotiations with Japan to achieve the Hogarth Deal, Japan has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for the process and for the majority of the IWC countries by:

ECO observes that this cannot be construed as “negotiating in good faith.”

Hogarth IWC Deal Universally Condemned

Volume LXI · No. 1a · Rome, Italy · Monday March 9, 2009
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Environmentalists around the globe have universally condemned a deal outlined in the paper presented to this special IWC Intersessional meeting by the Chairman of the Small Working Group and IWC Chair William Hogarth.

US NGOs have asked the new Administration of President Barack Obama to intervene against any weakening of the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling and to replace Dr. Hogarth and the US IWC Delegation with the new Director of NOAA.

The deal, as outlined, would give IWC approval, as a Schedule Amendment, to coastal whaling by Japan, a long-sought goal by whalers which would breach the IWC commercial whaling moratorium, as whale meat from such hunts is sold nationwide. Two options are proposed to either “phase out” scientific whaling by Japan in the Southern Ocean or to “phase down” such whaling. But Japan’s Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries quickly announced that Japan would absolutely not phase out their scientific whaling activity in the Southern Ocean, nor have they offered any specific numbers indicating how much they would alternatively phase down scientific whaling.

“We cannot accept a proposal that would end our research whaling program,” Fisheries Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters.

Furthermore, as NGOs have pointed out, the IWC cannot adopt any legal measure to stop or lower Japan’s scientific whaling permits unless the IRC itself is opened up and changed—there are no provisions for a Schedule Amendment to require changes in scientific whaling.

The Japan Fisheries Agency has a long history of refusals to take actions they previously pledged to take. They have repeatedly opposed adoption of the Revised Management Scheme, which would require them to reduce catches of whales to levels considered sustainable. They have further refused to review the catches of small cetaceans offshore Japan, claiming the IWC and Scientific Committee are “not competent” to address small cetaceans. Environmental-ists have repeatedly tested whale and dolphin meat caught in Japan’s coastal waters, demonstrating that the meat is contaminated with mercury, PCBs and other serious toxins, rendering coastal whale and dolphin meat poisonous to the Japanese people. Japan’s health agencies have so far refused to label such meat as toxic in markets or to remove it to protect the health of the Japanese people.

A new Southern Ocean Sanctuary would also be approved for five years under the Hogarth Deal, but, as with the existing Antarctic Sanctuary, Japan’s so-called scientific whaling could not be prevented in that proposed Sanctuary.

The Hogarth Deal thus provides the Japan Fisheries Agency their long-sought goal of coastal whaling, allows their scientific whaling scheme to continue apace, and provides no assurance that long-sought conservation goals supported by the majority of the IWC countries would be achieved.

Untrustworthy Japan

Volume LXI · No. 1a · Rome, Italy · Monday March 9, 2009
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The government of Japan has violated a 1984 bilateral agreement with the United States that committed Japan to end all whaling by 1988.

Japan negotiated the agreement in order to avoid heavy economic sanctions against Japan’s fishing industry when Japan violated the International Whaling Commission’s 1984 ban on sperm whaling. Under the bilateral agreement, which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled was comparable to a treaty,
the U.S. agreed to ignore Japan’s violation of both the sperm whaling ban and the overall ban on commercial whaling that went into effect in 1986.

In return for the U.S. deal, Japan committed to end all whaling by 1988 and to withdraw its objection to the commercial whaling ban which it filed in 1982 after the IWC decision.

But Japan stabbed the U.S. in the back in 1988 when it continued its outlaw whaling, claiming it was “research” whaling allowed under IWC rules. Every year since, Japan has sent its whaling fleet into the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific to hunt down minke, fin and Bryde’s whales, killing thousands of the “protected” whales in order to provide whale meat on the Japanese market.

When Japan violated the sperm whaling ban in 1984, a coalition of American conservation and animal welfare groups petitioned the U.S. government to certify Japan’s violation under the Pelly Amendment to the Fishermen’s Protective Act. A Pelly Amendment finding—that a nation “diminishes the effectiveness of an international fishery conservation agreement”—empowers the U.S. president to embargo any or all fishery products of the offending country. The certification also triggers the Packwood-Magnuson Amendment, a law aimed at outlaw whaling nations that automatically imposes immediate economic sanctions.

Japan knew that the Packwood-Magnuson law threatened its large fishing fleets operating in the richest fishery in the world—the Bering Sea—as well as along the U.S. west coast and in vast areas of the Pacific surrounding U.S. territorial islands. Pelly certification would ban Japanese fishing fleets from all waters in the U.S. 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). During the 1980s the Japanese fleets were taking more than $40 million of fish annually from U.S. waters under fishery access agreements with the U.S.

Japan’s foreign ministry desperately pleaded to the U.S. State Department in the summer of 1984 that Pelly certification and the automatic loss of fishing licenses would touch off a crisis in Japan-U.S. relations. So the four-year exemption deal was quietly worked out at the highest levels of the two governments. The bilateral agreement was signed just as the legal deadline approached for action on the environmentalists’ petition for certification.

When the environmental groups learned of the back-room deal, they filed suit in U.S. Federal Court, charging that the U.S. obligations under the IWC treaty overrode the bilateral agreement. The case, American Cetacean Society vs. Baldrige, was taken on pro bono by Washington’s largest and most powerful law firm, Arnold & Porter.

The U.S. District Court ordered the U.S. to certify Japan. The Japanese government pressed the Reagan Administration to appeal; the conservative court of appeals unanimously upheld the District Court decision. Japan then demanded that the case be appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court.

The Reagan Administration, arguing that the bilateral agreement was comparable to a treaty in legal status, persuaded the Supreme Court to hear its appeal. The deputy attorney general was sent to argue the case before the nine justices in 1986, claiming that Japan had committed to end “all whaling” by 1988, just two years beyond the IWC’s ban. Persuaded that the whales would be the winners in the end, five of the justices overturned the lower court decisions and allowed the bilateral treaty to stand - and the blocked the certification of Japan under the Pelly Amendment.

But Japan’s ruthless whaling industry, backed by the powerful ministry of agriculture, forestry and fisheries, was not about to end “all whaling.” The Antarctic fleet was sent out in the fall of 1987 to launch the 1988 whaling season. The U.S. was betrayed.

As soon as the first whale was reported killed, the U.S. environmentalists went back into federal court, filing a new suit identical to the 1984 complaint. The U.S State Department, joined by the Commerce Department which oversees IWC policy, knew that the bilateral agreement was violated and that there was no defense against Pelly certification and Packwood-Magnuson sanctions.

So the sword fell on Japan’s fishing industry in early 1988. Several fishing fleets were ordered out of the U.S. EEZ immediately. To this day, all Japanese fishing boats are banned from U.S. waters, a severe blow to one of Japan’s major industries.

Japan’s proud foreign ministry, which had fought so fiercely for the bilateral agreement, was humiliated by the defiance of the fisheries ministry. The U.S. State Department quietly expressed its outrage over the diplomatic debacle.

Japan’s embarrassed diplomats exacted a certain revenge on the outlaw whalers later in 1988 when the foreign ministry withdrew Japan’s 1982 objection to the IWC whaling ban—the only commitment honored in the bilateral deal. That effectively blocked any large-scale expansion of the Japanese whaling fleets; the “research” whaling has limited Japan’s whaling over the past 21 years to relatively few whales compared to previous decades.

The Obama Administration should reopen the bilateral agreement - which still has the effect of a treaty under the Supreme Court ruling - and press Japan to abide by the terms of the deal: no more whaling. Japan would then be compelled to hold a sumo match between the competing ministries.

Whaling Tidbits

Volume LXI · No. 1a · Rome, Italy · Monday March 9, 2009
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A new report backed by the European Parliament has called for the current moratorium on commercial whaling to be upheld by the international community. Along with the moratorium, the report supports a ban on international trade in whale products, the elimination of whaling for scientific purposes and the creation of marine sanctuaries where whales are specially protected.

The Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society announced that whale meat was seized from a pet food warehouse in Norway that was on pallets, destined for export to the Faroe Islands. Norwegian authorities seized the meat because the company was not registered to handle human food.

The main shopping centre in Osaka has decided to put whale meat on sale at half price in spite of criticisms from many countries that believe that Japan should respect the international ban on whale hunting. Instead of adhering to the moratorium set by the IWC, Japanese authorities continue to avoid it — justifying whale hunting with a vague “scientific research” explanation. Now they have decided to cut prices, trying to increase consumption of the meat.

Culling whales will not increase fisheries catches in tropical waters, according to a new paper supported by the Lenfest Ocean Program and published in the journal Science. For years, Japan has argued that reducing the number of baleen whales in the oceans would improve fisheries because whales eat fish that are caught for human consumption. The study published today found that even a complete eradication of whale populations in tropical waters would not lead to any significant increase in fish populations.

A new documentary, The Cove, by Louie Psihoyos and the Ocean Preservation Society, premiered at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January, winning the Audience Award. While the feature-length film focuses on the annual slaughter of dolphins in Japan, it includes considerable footage critical of the IWC and Japan’s continued whaling activities, as well as the legacy of toxic dolphin and whale meat. The Cove received standing ovations when screened at Sundance, and numerous enthusiastic reviews by film critics. The Cove will open in theaters around the world this summer. For more information, go to www.SaveJapanDolphins.org.

According to reports by Greenpeace, Japan possesses a surplus of 4,200 tons of whale meat which has been frozen in storage. Recent polling found that 71 percent of Japanese citizens do not support their country’s whaling industry, a concept verified through the closure of the top whale meat restaurant “Yushin” in Tokyo.

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