From the article:
The moratorium on commercial whaling, one of the world's major environmental achievements, is in danger of being abandoned after 24 years at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which begins this week in Morocco.
A proposed new deal, which stands a realistic chance of being passed at the conference in Agadir, would allow the three countries which have continued killing the great whales in defiance of the ban – Japan, Norway and Iceland – to recommence whaling legally in return for bringing down their catches.
However, many conservationists do not believe that catches will actually fall under the proposed new agreement, and one of the world's leading whaling scientists recently described it in testimony to the US Congress as "a scam ... likely to fool many people".
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Should the moratorium be dismantled, it would represent one of the most damaging setbacks ever for wildlife conservation. The ban, which was agreed in 1982 and became operational in 1986, was introduced after a long and intense campaign by environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace.
They were protesting against the intense cruelty of whaling, where the killing is done by firing explosive harpoons into the large, intelligent animals, and also against the fact that many of the stocks of the great whales had been drastically reduced by over-hunting, with blue whales driven to the brink of extinction.
Although large-scale whaling came to an end with the ban, and populations began to recover, three countries carried on killing: Japan, by labelling its hunting "scientific research", and the Norwegians and Icelanders by lodging formal objections. Since 1986 the three nations have between them killed more than 30,000 whales, the Japanese leading with more than 1,000 whales a year – mainly minke whales, but also Bryde's, fin, sei and sperm whales.
But the global total of kills has nevertheless fallen to a tiny fraction of what it was, and the moratorium has been an unqualified success from a whale conservation point of view.
The deal which may do away with it, which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.
One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.
Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.
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Justin Cooke, who is the representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on the IWC Scientific Committee, took the deal apart in the US Congress, in evidence to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Dr Cooke said: "The proposal is disingenuous and I suspect that it will fool many people." It was a scam, he said, in which the calculation of how many whales could be killed was being left to politicians rather than scientists.
I have always considered Ted Stevens a slimy bastard, but this latest revelation upgrades him to a walking, talking, waste of oxygen.
Click here to download Dr. Cooke's testimony in Congress. Short, sweet, and worth reading.
If your attention span is longer and your tolerance for bullshit higher than mine, you can download the full 43-page proposal here.
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