My trip started at 0800 from Lisbon on a Bus drive to the Algarve where I arrived 1130, after overlooking some of the nice views that the Alentejo and the Algarve offer, just in time to meet Sidney and Tim Holt at Hotel Faro, very close to the bus station.

I was greeted by Sidney Tim and Margarida Castro, who invited me to come along and be present at Sidney’s and Dan Pauly’s lectures. She is a lovely lady, with a profound knowledge of the region and of many stories fisheries and aquaculture, very interesting woman!

It was really nice to see Sidney and Tim again after the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Maderia, last June.

We had lunch at a local café near the university, after checking the auditorium and a little of the campus, where I also met Adelino, Margarida’s boss, Janita (an expert on ictiology), and some others.

After lunch, we headed to the auditorium, where Sidney presented his speech.

I took some notes, so I could keep tabs and retain more of his words in my head! But then I asked Sidney’s own notes, transcribed below.

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Notes for a talk at the University of Algarve, Portugal, 28 January 2010

Sidney Holt

Robber generations 1: Whaling

1. Thank you for the invitation.

2. You will know from the programme that I am to give two talks on successive days, perhaps to diverse audiences. Their themes are essentially the same and they are connected. I’ll try to make them comprehensible even to those unable to attend both talks. I’ll say now, however, that I shall not discuss an issue that is close to my own heart, and which is perhaps the only reason one can give for believing that whaling should be ended, permanently – that is the extreme cruelty involved in it.

3. The theme is that the Industrial Revolution and the Capitalist economy have given living generations the power and the incentive to deprive future generations of access to non-renewable and renewable resources, and to saddle them with enormous debts. Nothing new in that. But in limiting my talks to my own experience – today with respect to whales and whaling, and tomorrow with respect to fish and fisheries – I hope I might find some things to say which, if not brand new or original, are new to at least some of you. In being so selective with respect to time and subjects I am aware, of course, that throughout what we call civilization, present generations have robbed the future. Greeks, Romans, Tudor monarchs all  destroyed forests to build ships for war and trade, polluted and diverted freshwaters, put mercury and lead into the environment. But not only is the scale of our destruction many orders of magnitude greater, it is more diverse, might be irreversible and we engage in it increasingly for fun.

4. For fun? Consider the response of our economic wizards to the current global crisis: “Please go out and buy things, even if you don’t need them or even really want them. That will get the economy going again and might even lead to some of the new unemployed getting jobs. Eat more, then buy an exercise machine to get rid of your excess weight’’. When I was growing up as a child in London my parents sometimes bought a chicken for dinner. Actually once a year, at Christmas. Now millions of people expect to be able to eat chicken practically every day.

5. So, to whales and whaling. First, a few statistics. In the 1930s the catch of baleen whales, by weight, in the Antarctic was about 15% of the global marine catch, and considerably more than that by value. In the forty years from 1931/32 to 1971/72 the total catch was more than 50 million tonnes. Catcher boats worked for more that 500,000 days for this, that is each took about 100 tonnes per day. Among these were 200,000 blue whales (nearly all killed before 1961/72), 300,000 fin whales and 100,000 sei whales (mostly killed in the ten seasons from 1961/62. ) I don’t have a comparable figure for the number of humpback whales killed in the Antarctic but many of them, from the same populations, were killed in the Southern Gemisphere outside the Antarctic, especially from land stations in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Chile.

6. Very few people NEED to eat whales. Industrial whaling for whalebone (baleen) whale species  (I’ll put aside the sperm whales for later if there is time), beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, were caught, at first mainly by Norwegians, to make money – very large amounts of it. The precious oil was mostly exported, and it was used for lighting and for making toiletries. Before World War 1 and during it, it was used to make glycerine as a raw material for explosives. Then German chemists devised a way to turn it into a substitute for butter, and that market kept baleen whaling going, especially in the Antarctic, throughout the inter-war period. Although Norwegian and British companies were the main beneficiaries of this development, Germany and Japan joined up in the mid-1940s. German interest was in the Nazi slogan “Guns, not butter”. Japan’s interest was more subtle: its factory ships brought whale oil to Rotterdam, where it was traded for convertible currency (and was transferred to Germany); the empty factory-tankers traveled to California where they picked up American fuel oil for their military machine, and took it back across the Pacific – an annual circumnavigation worthy of Ferdinand Magellan.

7. After World War II the American occupiers of defeated Japan decided that the starving Japanese people really did need to eat whales, and General McArthur personally authorised ships newly converted to whaling factories to go whaling in the Antarctic. At first this was said to be an emergency measure, for one year only, or perhaps two. That was a lie – the Japanese fleet was steadily increased until it eventually – in 1987 – came to monopolise whaling in the southern hemisphere. Monopoly is important because the technology (as well as the human skills) concerned with hunting, killing and processing whales is of a high order; not quite rocket science or atom-bashing but in some respects not far from those, more like building aircraft. Meanwhile British power in occupied Germany ensured that German companies did not go whaling, as they wished; the result was that the Germans practically ran the notorious “pirate whaling” expedition of 1950-1956, the Olympic Challenger, owned by Aristotle Onassis. The factory ship was registered in Panama and the accompanying catcher boats in Honduras; the company office was in Hamburg. Let me read you the commentary on that episode provided by the organizers of the eighth Cologne Whaling Meeting, held in November 2009:

What unfolded then, was a dramatic, international and very dirty action story, involving US secret agents, Norwegian and German transport trade unions, the German Federal Fisheries Research Institute, the Norwegian Whaling Association, the Peruvian navy, Lloyds of London, the Erste Deutsche Walfang Gesellschaft in Hamburg, bribery, treason, court action in Hamburg and Rotterdam, mutual confiscation of ships and whale oil cargoes, plus the diplomatic efforts of at least half a dozen maritime nations in Europe and the Americas. This was too much even for an unscrupulous business hardliner like Onassis. He sold his whaling fleet to Japan in 1956. At the end of negotiations with the Norwegian Whaling Association about the damages which the Norwegian industry had sustained through his fleet’s infractions of international whaling regulations, he conceded to the Norwegian side to keep their face and to release a faked message that he, Onassis, admitted the damage done by Olympic Challenger. Little concerned about his own reputation, ruined as it was anyway, he even let them spread the word that he paid a penalty of 3 million dollars intended to build the House of Whaling (hvalfangstens hus) next to the harbour of Sandefjord. With Onassis’s known sangfroid and toughness, however, it is more than likely that the Norwegian whaler owners in fact were forced to spent this money out of their own pockets.” [1]

The factory ship’s name was changed to Kyokuyo Maru 2 and it whaled under tha Japanese flag for another seventeen years.

8. Those engaged in what is known as pelagic whaling were conducting what was really a mining operation. In the 1930s, and again in the mid-1940s to 1960s, a notional limit was set to the total numbers of four or five species of baleen whales that could be killed in the Antarctic – the so-called Blue Whale Unit (BWU) in which the different species were graded in terms of their relative oil yields. But this limit never had a scientific basis, and was created mainly to limit production of oil in order to stabilise prices. In the later years, as whales diminished and competition for the survivors intensified, the BWU provided the basis for agreements among the whaling nations – UK, Norway, USSR and Japan – for shares of the what in fisheries jargon is now called the Total Allowable Catch (TAC).  The Netherlands was a fifth Antarctic pelagic operator, a newcomer, but, with a long tradition of whaling in the North Atlantic, and for several years a thorn in the side of the other whalers, especially the Europeans.[2] Through this period the British and Norwegians were mainly responsible for the near extinction of the blue and humpback whales and the depletion of the fin whales. Japan and the USSR added their help later, when killing relatively small numbers had a disproportionately big effect on the outcome – mainly in the 1960s. However, Japan  in the 1960s saw another opportunity and, with help from the USSR, depleted the populations of the smaller sei whale. Another smallish species – the Bryde’s whale, which lives in warmer waters – was depleted by the Japanese in the Pacific and by various pirate whalers serving Japan’s meat market, in the Atlantic. (By the device of declaring the Indian Ocean as a whale sanctuary both were prevented from doing the same in the Indian Ocean.)

9. In 1970, Japan and the USSR began the mining of the smallest baleen whale in the southern hemisphere, the minke; Brazil was allowed a few crumbs from their table (Norway continues to kill large numbers of a closely related species in the Northeast Atlantic). The declaration in 1982 of a moratorium on commercial whaling, of indefinite duration, coming into effect in 1986, put an end to the USSR’s effort (which had been conducted only to yield convertible currency by sale to the Japanese market). But Japan, having attained its monopoly aim – which had been perceived by the Norwegians as early as 1938 – was determined to continue, and has since then used a loophole in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946, which allows any nation unilaterally to award its nationals Special Permits to kill unlimited numbers of any species of whale, anywhere, provided it is declared to be “for scientific purposes”.  Under that provision Japanese whalers have killed increasing numbers of minke whales every year, especially in the Antarctic but also more recently in the North Pacific. Now they are being given permits also to kill fin and humpback whales.

10. The “scientific whaling operations’’ make profits, or at least break even, by large government subsidies barely disguised as support for scientific research. The rest of the income comes from the sale of frozen whale meat, which is – luckily for the industry – a practical requirement of the ICRW loophole. Meanwhile the Government subsidises continuing efforts to increase meat sales in Japan in support of increasing catches, though this is proving to be more difficult than the industry expected.  The Government of Japan has also, for a decade or so, taken steps to try to ensure that the IWC takes no other conservation-oriented steps that would require a three-fourths majority vote for their enactment. Through Japan’s  “vote consolidation programme”, fuelled mainly by the overseas aid budget, enough new countries have been brought into the IWC to provide a blocking one-fourth vote.[3] That game was so successful that the whaling lobby was encouraged to try for a simple majority, and nearly succeeded a few years ago. The intention was to overturn various decisions and initiatives by non-whaling nations, such as establishing a standing Committee on Conservation, establishing more “sanctuaries” for whales in which commercial whaling is not permitted,[4] adopting resolutions calling for cessation or limitation of scientific whaling, and promoting whale-watching as a way of using whale resources benignly.

11. A profitable and sustainable industry could perhaps be feasible on a fairly small scale when the depleted baleen whale populations have largely recovered – some, especially the humpback and possibly the blue whales, are known to be increasing and presumably so are the fin whales, which were long the backbone of the Antarcic industry and, originally numbering more than half-a-million animals, were not reduced so close to extinction as the other large species.  But recovery to at least, say, half their original numbers, will take many decades, and the whalers are impatient, so are seeking excuses for resuming large-scale whaling before recovery has progressed much further. The gimmick being used to that end is a plausible claim – totally unsubstantiated by research – that whales are eating so many fish of interest to humans, that they must be “culled”. A related claim is that minke whales have long been benefiting from krill over-abundance arising from the reduction in the numbers of the bigger species, and so have vastly increased in number, so are impeding the recovery of the blue whale – which has a similar diet – so they must be culled first. These gambits are the jemmies with which to escape from the globally accepted twin imperatives of sustainable use of wild living resources and the precautionary principle.

12. Meanwhile the IWC’s Scientific Committee has devised a much improved management procedure for calculating safe catch limits – an activity in which the three still-whaling countries – Japan, Norway and Iceland – played practically no part. This was accepted by the Commission itself but not implemented, pending agreement on water-tight arrangements to ensure compliance with regulations. As yet there has been no agreement on such arrangements, despite ten years of effort, and the Commission has put the entire negotiation on a back-burner.

13. Meanwhile, the one factory ship, the Nisshin Maru  is getting old and distinctly unreliable. It is also too small for large-scale processing of the larger whale species and does not have the processing equipment for the production of the variety of by-products that often make the difference between profit and loss. Discussions are rumoured to be on-going concerning investment in a larger and better replacement. If that goes ahead there would seem to be little practical impediment to Japan expanding and continuing Antarctic and North Pacific whaling for several more decades. Or a pure business decision might be taken to end it, encouraged by growing reluctance of the state to continue and expand the current level of subsidy. In that case we should expect to hear that the decision has been made for reasons of compliance with international wishes and broad public sentiment. Some kind of quid pro quo will surely be demanded; the most likely one is agreement for the continuation of small-scale minke whaling in the Northwest Pacific.

14. I promised to say something about the sperm whale, the Moby Dick whale. That is better news.This species is by far the largest of the toothed whales and is a very special animal. For one thing it has the largest brain of any species ever on the planet, and not just because its body is big. The sperm whale can dive deeper than any other marine mammal, possibly matched only by the smaller but formidablebottlenose whalesThere is, as far as we know, just one species, with a global distribution from the tropics to the polar regions. It has a remarkable communication and sensing system, using its head as a sound producer and collector. Each individual announces its own, individual name. It contains a unique kind of oil, which was why American whalers, especially hunted it throughout the 19^th century. The oil also has special properties as a lubricant that led to it becoming a strategic asset through the 20^th Century, especially to the USA and the USSR. American supplies came mostly from land station operations under other flags, world-wide. The Soviet pelagic fleets caught them especially in the Southern Hemisphere. Vegetable and synthetic alternatives were also found for sperm oil. The social structure of the species – males are much bigger than females and the dominant individuals keep “harems” – make it very difficult to devise safe ways of managing sperm whaling. Although they remained more numerous than all the baleen whales except the minke, even after two centuries of intense exploitation, the species was protected, in 1981, by a special moratorium, to which there no standing objections nor plans to continue killing them in the name of science. Towards the end the most valuable product from sperm whales was ivory from its teeth; the carved teeth are famous as scrimshaw International trade in the ivory and the oil is banned. A few are still killed by native islanders in Indonesia, who eat the meat – but as they are high-level predators their flesh is contaminated with persistent pollutants.

15. Tomorrow I’ll say more about the IWC’s Revised Management Procedure, as a model for improved fisheries management. But I’ll now close with two quotations. The first is from Jacques-Yves Cousteau:

Future wars will be between those who defend nature & those who destroy it.

The other, less aggressive, but still firm, is from  Franklin D..Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, in 1937:

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

I that true or not true? Thank you, see you tomorrow.

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[1] “The Arts and Crafts of Olympic Challenger. Souvenirs, company gifts, and whaler folk art from the Onassis whaling venture, 1950-1956” Notes for the special exhibition, by Klaus Barthelmess, November 2009. This document contains a bibliography of German engagement in the whaling industry, mostly papers by Barthelmess.

[2] Just as the Japanese people were short of protein in 1946 the Dutch were short of fats and oils, and had no funds to import adequate supplies. They were at odds with the Norwegians, who prohibited their nationals – especially highly skilled gunners – from working on foreign whaling ships. Unlike the other Europeans and the Japanese, the Dutch pelagic whalers were operated by a state-owned company. Having only one factory it was difficult for the company to subsist when Antarctic catch limits began to be reduced sharply in the late 1960s; other European nations simply reduced the numbers of their factories.

[3] “Japan’s ‘vote consolidation operation’ in the International Whaling Commission” Third Millennium Foundation, Paciano (PG), Italy, August 2007, 96pp.

[4] The Indian Ocean was declared a sanctuary in 1979, and the entire Southern Ocean in 1994. These were initiatives of Seychelles and france, respectively. Latin American states and South Africa want the South Atlantic to be a sanctuary, while Australia and New Zealand, among others, have sought to make arrangements for protecting whales in the South Pacific.

After his lecture we headed back to the Hotel where I took that free time to write some of my notes and talked with my new IFAW’s boss Paul Todd in relation to a one month project what I’ll conduct in February. It was nice and I’m looking forward to it.

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Margarida then came to take us out to dinner (in a very nice part of the old town), and when we met in the hall, 1900, there was some other people to meet, Emidgio Cadima (a Portuguese expert on Fisheries) and Daniel Pauly (an internationally renowned fisheries expert), both to be given a “Honoris Causa” Doctorate by the University of the Algarve. Also amoung the people going out to have dinner with us was a Sidney’s old friend and very important Portuguese figure, Mário Ruivo.

Dinner was excellent and I was delighted to be among all those extraordinary figures, Adelino, Karim (Margarida’s husband and also a lecturer at the university), a man I cannot recall the name, but who was from dorset and eaching the MSc students at the university and another couple people I missed the name (as usual!).
I was thrilled!

After that I had the chance to meet an old friend. Susana, his girlfriend is a MSc student at the University of the Algarve, and recognized me between the audience. It was very pleasant to meet her and then latter at night Ricardo “Freaky” “Exodon” Branco, a didgeridoo player that went to study in the same university and I in Wales, University of Glamorgan.
We had a couple of drinks and tomorrow I’m expected to meet him at lunch time to see his new didgeridoo project, quite excited about it!

Time to bed, tomorrow early, and full day!