KEY POINTS:
LONDON - Japan, accused of buying votes with foreign aid, will renew its campaign against the ban on whaling when the International Whaling Commission meets in Alaska later this month, campaigners said today.
At last year's meeting on St Kitts and Nevis, Tokyo managed by one vote to
get the IWC to agree a weakly-worded declaration that the 21-year-old moratorium was unnecessary, but it did not mount a frontal attack on the ban itself.
Since then it has been continuing its efforts, triggering a counter-campaign led by Britain to woo anti-whaling nations like Slovenia, Croatia and Cyprus to join the 74-nation IWC.
"It looks like the anti-whalers may have a majority of one or two votes to overturn the St Kitts declaration, but that could easily change," said Vassili Papastavrou from the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
"Japan does not have enough votes to overturn the moratorium -- for that it would need a three-quarters majority -- but its strategy is to continue to undermine it," he told reporters.
Campaigners say Japan has been giving development aid to non-whaling nations, particularly in Africa, in return for them joining the IWC and voting in favour of Tokyo's pro-whaling proposals.
This year Japan comes to the negotiating table with an extra bargaining chip -- renewal of the five-year Bowhead whale quota for indigenous hunters which is shared between Russia and the United States but which Tokyo blocked in 2002.
"The US is desperate to have the quota for its aboriginal Bowhead whale hunting renewed," Papastavrou said.
He said Japan was offering two options in return for its Bowhead vote -- broadening the definition of aboriginal whaling to include its coastal whalers or an IWC declaration endorsing widescale scientific whaling.
Both, said IFAW, would breach the code and the spirit of the body founded in 1946 to protect whales from over-exploitation and which brought in a global hunting ban 40 years later.
A loophole allowed so-called scientific whaling for cetacean research which is widely dismissed as a hunting smokescreen by anti-whaling campaigners.
"We regard scientific whaling as commercial whaling by another name," said Papastavrou.
Campaigners note that southern hemisphere blue whale numbers have slumped to 1,700 from 240,000 in 1990. The humpback whale population has fallen to 25,000 from 115,000, and there are only 120 western gray whales left alive.
Since 1993 the number of whales killed each year has surged to more than 1,900 from 550, and over 30,000 have now been killed since the ban came into force.
Japan kills some 700 whales a year for research. Norway killed nearly 1,000 last year and Iceland killed 60.
Despite claims that the killing is for scientific purposes, whale meat is openly sold in Japan where it is a delicacy and Iceland is trying to open up a commercial trade with Tokyo.
So far this has been rejected by Japan because it has a glut of whale meat, so much that a report last year said it was being sold as dog food.
The meeting in Anchorage from May 28-31 is not Japan's only line of attack. It will at the meeting in The Hague from June 3-15 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species call for a review of all whales on the endangered list.
- REUTERS
