Frenetic, stressful, inflammatory debates and very unproductive, the old same! This was the ambience surrounding the 60th Meeting of the International Whaling Commission, (IWC) hosted by the Government of Chile and held at Santiago.
After several decades of little change in terms of making the IWC a body that regulates properly whaling, it is sliding off to the middle ages framework. This because now (and like the UN) the IWC has a “mini-commission” that decides (by consensus) what goes around on the main venue, and so controls topics and themes that are “allowed” to e discussed. Preventing the other members of having an active and demanding stance inside the Commission itself.
It is my belief that this mini-commission is not going anywhere and should be dismantled during the next couple of meetings. However it is undermining all the work environmentalist and conservative government have done so far. Even those government are being blunt on their position. And worst of all the NGOs are giving out “votes of confidence” to governments who are betraying them and they keep supporting them. Some NGOs (big ones) even are saying one thing to the press and other inside the room. I must say i was very pleased to be representing the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in Chile, whose position was the same throughout the meeting, it had the vision and clarity to see what was going behind the scenes and made accurate and precise conclusions about the outcome.

In sum the 60th meeting of the IWC was highly armful to whales, the so much hoped Southern Atlantic Sanctuary was not even proposed and all conservation work stopped. Who really won was Japan that didn’t gave any sign of good faith, keep their “junk-science” research in the Southern Ocean and took hard measures to prevent a transparent and democratic system inside the IWC (it might as well have won the secret ballot vote that it has been trying for years now).

As IFAW stated on its press released, “we didn’t ask fopr voting to stop, the only thing we want to see stopped is whaling!”

It will be interesting so see how things go in Madeira next year, where I’ll have much work on my shoulders to do and my only hope is that I may deliver good results.