Samoa wants NZ and Japan to resolve whaling

Greenpeace activists try to stop a Japanese whaler working in the Southern Ocean. Picture / Reuters

Samoa's Prime Minister believes New Zealand and Japan should resolve their differences over whaling.

Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi said the two countries had different interpretations of the same sustainability of marine resources concept.

He said Samoa had made its position clear by declaring support for a policy in favour of marine resource sustainability in the Pacific region.

"That means we support policies that will ensure the continuity and the proper balance of the existence of marine resources for the use of the people of the Pacific for the future," said Tuilaepa.

"That implies that if there is any killing [of whales], it should be on a level that will not result in an imbalance of the availability of resources and that the sustainability of marine resources will be maintained."

The Samoan leader said he believed both New Zealand and Japan held similar views.

But, he said, New Zealand claimed that Japan's continued killing of whales would result in the destruction of marine resource sustainability.

On the other hand, Japan was saying that, on the basis of their research, if they did not continue with the killing, the substantially multiplying whale population would devour marine resources dependent on the food chain.

"New Zealand is saying the statistics are wrong but then New Zealand has not come up with proper research," said Tuilaepa.

He said Pacific peoples attached more importance to skipjack tuna to sustain their livelihood and had no interest in whales which, according to Japanese research, were devouring huge amounts of the food chain, including tuna.

"We do not eat whales but we eat tuna. We don't earn foreign exchange in tourism on whales but New Zealand earns lots and lots of foreign exchange from whales. We applaud marine protection on the basis of the broad concept of sustainability of resources.

"We think there ought to be a balance of marine resources and there should be a minimal amount of whales. And there should be lots and lots of skipjack tuna.

"New Zealand is for sustainability of resources; Japan is for sustainability of resources, but everybody has a different understanding of what that means," said the Samoan Prime Minister.

"The two camps must sit down and discuss who is right. We are just saying that both camps are agreeing on the same principle that we agree to. It is for the two to sort out their differences."

Conservation Minister Chris Carter, who led the New Zealand delegation at this year's International Whaling Commission meeting (IWC), said he was "disappointed" by the remarks.

"There is a whale watch operation in Samoa and I think the Prime Minister seems to have been seduced by some of Japan's pseudo science," he said.

Japan has long been accused of buying votes at the IWC, the international body charged with regulating whaling but which in recent years has become the battleground between pro- and anti-whaling nations.

Japan has also been accused of carrying out suspect science to bolster the case for its "scientific whaling" programme, approved by the IWC and under which it kills hundreds of whales a year.

Mr Carter said he would send information to the Samoan leader about New Zealand's stand. He did not believe whales were the reason for the slump in tuna stocks and said the Samoan Prime Minister appeared to be misinformed.

"I think over-fishing by countries like Japan is a much more realistic reason for the decline of tuna in the Pacific."

- Herald correspondent, Apia.