A one-day seminar on Monday brought delegates from 12 developing countries, most of them not IWC members, to Tokyo to discuss "sustainable use" of whales.
An official told the BBC that Japan hoped these nations would join the IWC.
The nations concerned include those famously whale interested places Angola and Eritrea. At least they have ocean frontage, I suppose.
This is no way to run a whaling commission, although I also wonder what the outcome would be if all nations had to participate via the UN or some such body. The problem then would probably just be getting enough of the uninterested nations to not abstain from votes.
The International Whaling Commission website is full of information, and the page relating to Japan's "scientific" whaling is here. The number of whales Japan wants to take for its new research program is set out as follows:
Annual sample sizes for the proposed full-scale research (lethal sampling) are 850 (with 10% allowance) Antarctic minke whales (Eastern Indian Ocean and Western South Pacific stocks), 50 humpback whales (D and E stocks) and 50 fin whales (Indian Ocean and the Western South Pacific stocks).They are holding off on the humpbacks for now, as most people would know.
I'm not particularly romantic about my anti-whaling sentiments. If a seaside nation has a long tradition of catching and eating hapless passing whales, I don't have any problem with them taking a relatively small number for old time's sake.
But when a nation wants to go to the ends of the earth to collect close to a thousand every year just for what most residents now treat as a novelty source of protein and some sort of sop to their national pride: that's when I have a problem. It would be like Australia insisting that it is reasonable for it to go and take any manatee that drifted into international waters off Florida because aborigines on Cape York enjoy the odd dugong.
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