I recall the message from the pro surfer and environmentalist warrior Dave Rastovich, just days before the 61st International Whaling Commission meeting started in Madeira, Portugal. He ended it by saying that “Honour and respect are nowhere to be found within the modern whaling crime”.
This sentence to me marked that meeting and period, when Japan uses corruption end to meet his aims, with no regard to nature and the livelihood and heritage of the next generations, using resources for profit or stubbornness, if that resources goes extinct, it doesn’t really matter. The IWC61 itself was a big hole full of nothing, and especially big governmental mouths full of empty words and no actions, no resolutions and no whales saved during that meeting.
Mr. Mark Simmonds summed it up very well when he wrote on his blog: “So where were we – ah yes in the gloom of a vast meeting chamber of a big international meeting room where ‘nothing is decided until everything is decided’ … or possibly just ‘nothing is decided’”
I was profoundly sad and as it has been usual during the last period that I’ve attended the IWC and done actions and contributed to the movement devoted to end whaling, I was feeling what I like to call a “post-action depression”. Happens after a very intense period of work and by the end of it nothing has been accomplished. Our struggle was in vain, and it has been since Japan started whaling in the southern ocean sanctuary, to recruit countries to their side, and established a stalemate inside the IWC, meaning that nothing changes year after year.
But some light is shinning ahead, maybe it is a tunnel end, or not…
In the beginning of the year I wrote an entry titled “And if the crisis would solve the whaling issue?” where I wondered that even though “we cannot really forecast what will happen, and do nothing but wondering about it [while we keep fighting to make whaling history], the fuel prices will fell dramatically, the Japanese whaling industry and hardware is getting old and they been having repeated misfortunes lately. The Oriental Bluebird, the refueling vessel that would go down to the Antarctic lost its registration and Panamá flag and is now registered in Japan requiring more staff and funds etc.”
Now it seems that my thoughts were not so astray.
The eminent change it is not only due to crisis, but to a number of given situations lead by it. Political change in Japan itself; shortly after taking office last October the Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama confide his dislike for whale meat saying that “I hate whale meat”.
Even thou the government at the time was showing no signs of discontinue the policy followed by his antecedents; buttressing up an unnecessary, unsustainable and uneconomic industry that has no place in the 21st century, now things seem to be changing.
IFAW was also focusing efforts inside Japan and with other NGOs such as Greenpeace urged the new Prime Minister to rethink about Japan stance on whaling and its national fleet.
The end of whaling in the southern ocean seems a possible reality now! I have withstand long conversations with Milko Schvartzman from Greenpeace International, and his belief was that if we are to save whales, the frontline of resistance must be inside Japan, our activism our efforts must come from within. Us on the outside are like little helpers, and can do just up to some point. My dear friend Sidney Holt also shared that vision; he always says that whaling has to be so economically unbearable that it is abandoned.
Now it seems that crisis will also affect whaling. We hope!
Information arrived to me via the Greenpeace International website with the topic: End of Japanese whaling might be in sight.
On it you can read:
“A major review of Japanese government spending could spell the end to whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
Commissioned to cut wasteful programmes by Japan’s new government, a review committee has proposed massive cuts in subsidies to a body which funds the so-called whaling research programme.
Without government subsidies, the whaling programme would be doomed.
The Spending Review Committee recommended that the Overseas Fisheries Cooperation Fund (OFCF), which gives loans to the Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) to run the discredited science programme, have all of its funding revoked, except monies needed for loans in 2010.
The OFCF claims it needs 70.4 billion yen (around US$780 million) for various programmes, including whaling, in 2010. The Review Committee and Cabinet Office will determine by early next year if the proposed operations for 2010 are actually “necessary” or should also be cut.
The Institute for Cetacean Research, which runs the whaling programme, has failed to repay government loans for several years now, as demand for whale meat has plummeted and the cost of whaling increased. Practises which would have lead to bankruptcy for any commercial firm have been the target of outspoken criticism not only from Greenpeace Japan, but from the business press and even the former spokesperson for the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Tomohiko Taniguchi. Taniguchi lamented the financial propping up of a programme that caused endless headaches for Tokyo abroad and generated revenues worth “less than one-tenth the value of the country’s annual market for toothbrushes.”
With the change in government at the recent election, a new focus on reducing spending and cutting wasteful programmes.
Two Greenpeace activists, Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki, have spoken out against the cost of the whaling programme and the fact that only a handful of fat-cat bureaucrats really profit from the programme. Last year alone it cost 8 billion yen, or nearly US$90 million, to run the annual Southern Ocean whale hunt. Of that, 1.2 billion yen, or more than US$10 million, came from government subsidies. The rest is in theory covered by the sales of whale meat.”
Still I’m not 100% convinced and I’m afraid that what Japan does is to resize their fleet, keep its recruited countries in sufficient number to take away a 75% majority to the pro-whale bloc inside the IWC thus preventing them from taking resolutions to vote that are binding; and keep on whaling. Other perspective if for Japan to hold its status as it is until the Small Working Group (SWG) negotiations are finished, and accomplish its goals and face-saving.
But I’m optimistic; the actions lead by Junichi and Toru had a big impact, not only in the media but also, because there was some tight control over meat coming from the Antarctic, some Japanese whalers stopped from going boarding for the Antarctic whaling season. Because, without the extra money they were making from meat they kept for free, after returning from the Antarctic, it was not worth to embark on that voyage. For this reason Japan had to start hiring and training whalers from Korea and other countries of Southeast Asia, making whaling even more expensive. Also the toll they get with their recruiting programme in order to have enough support inside the IWC and control roughly 50% of votes is so big that I wonder until when can it keep up, with an industry that doesn’t contribute to the Japanese economy health, and in fact it is a drag and forces Japan to spend taxpayers’ money, rather than making profit.
Now we need to keep up with our work, in my opinion we should even direct more actions and efforts inside Japan, and watch as a economical crisis and the necessity of cuts on public spending, take whalers from the southern ocean sanctuary forever, as it should be!
