Sunday Times investigation over Japan bribery over Whaling! A MUST SEE!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jugR9VnzDIA

“Under a cloud of corruption allegations the IWC is taking a safe course, opting for a cooling off period that protects the moratorium and other IWC conservation measures,”  said Patrick Ramage, Director of IFAW’s Global Whale Campaign. “Had it been done here, this deal would have lived in infamy.”

The proposal, three years in the making, proposed a compromise between whaling and non-whaling nations which regularly clash at annual IWC meetings. Among the most hotly debated components of the proposal was a plan to overturn the worldwide ban on whaling, in place since 1986, by allowing legalized hunting of whales by Iceland, Norway, and Japan – the last three countries still hunting whales commercially. Japan, Norway, and Iceland have illegally killed nearly 35,000 whales since the inception of the moratorium.

“This was an intense three year effort but one conducted behind closed doors and focused on defining terms under which commercial whaling would continue rather than how it would end,” said Ramage. “The proposal it produced could not withstand public scrutiny and ignored the overwhelming global support for permanent protection for whales. Any future process of negotiation should not leave the views, expertise, and perspective of the global NGO community sitting outside.”

High-level talks over a global whaling peace deal are to be sent behind closed doors, in an abrupt move said to show that a bid for compromise is close to failure.

The decision to suspend the International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting shortly after it opens later today was agreed in private at the demand of the acting IWC chairman, Anthony Liverpool, Fairfax Media has learnt.

It has surprised lobbyists, as well as some IWC nations who, after months of closed door talks, wanted the controversial deal finally to be argued in the open.

The suspension also prevents the peace talks from being derailed on the floor of the  meeting by rising disquiet over Japan’s vote-buying scandal.

The British marine environment minister, Richard Benyon, had planned to raise reports of Tokyo’s largesse, including payments to support the attendance of Mr Liverpool who comes from Antigua in the Caribbean.

About 65 IWC members, including an unprecedented number of government ministers, are in Agadir to work on the deal that offers Japan, Iceland and Norway new rights to commercial whaling.

In exchange, the whalers’ catches were to be reduced overall, and there was to be an end to loopholes such as the IWC’s discredited “scientific” whaling clause.

A key negotiator said of the meeting’s suspension: “This is one last attempt to see if there is any common ground. We will be split up into small groups, and we won’t be coming back until Wednesday.”

Patrick Ramage, the global whale program director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said Mr Liverpool had ordered the closed-door meetings with a view to fast-tracking the proposal when the formal session reopens on Wednesday.

“Whatever one’s view on the proposal, its adoption under the present circumstances will destroy any remaining credibility for the whaling commission,”  Mr Ramage said.

Source: theage.com.au

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.

—

[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!

I’ll stay with Sidney’s son, Tim Holt, also a good buddy, very kind for letting me share his room. Will take the bus from Lisbon at 0815 to arrive at 1130, and hopefully have lunch with the Holt’s.

Sidney has his first speech at 1400, with the title, Robber Generations 1 – The case of Great Whales.

Then on the 29th (Thrusday), Sidney will give a speech entitled Robber Generations 2 – The Case of Marine Fishes, at 1000. Following Dan Pauly will present the title Impact of global fisheries and global warming on marine ecosystems at 1100.

The event is hosted by the University of the Algarve.

More info here

Exmos(as) Senhores(as),

Venho convidá-los para as palestras proferidas pelos professores Sidney Holt
e Daniel Pauly nos dias 28 e 29 de Janeiro no Campus de Gambelas da Universidade do Algarve. Os professores Holt e Pauly são os investigadores que maior influência tiveram na gestão mundial dos recursos marinhos nos últimos 50 anos. As palestras são de entrada livre.

I invite you to the lectures by professors Sidney Holt and Daniel Pauly on January 28th and 29th at Campus de Gambelas, University of Algarve. Professors Holt and Pauly are two of the most influential scientists in the management of the world living marine resources in the last 50 years. Entrance is open to all.

Adelino Canário
Director of CCMAR

Programa / Program

CV – Sidney J. Holt
CV – Daniel Pauly

CCMAR – Centro de Ciências do Mar
Universidade do AlgarveCampus de Gambelas
Edifício 7 – Gabinete 2.87
8005 – 139 FARO
http://ccmar.ualg.pt

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!

]]> http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/12/the-end-of-whaling-in-the-southern-ocean/feed/ 1 http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/02/the-fixer/ http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/02/the-fixer/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:14:01 +0000 Chico http://www.frangoncalves.com/?p=578 During my short career I’ve been called many things, but the name that stands out the most is beyond any doubt the one Alex Garcia from Varda Group gave me on the Secretariat description for the PEW Whales Commission meeting held in Lisbon last week, THE FIXER.
It was also the first time I have a name plate, just for me once! I know is noting special but it was nice nonetheless.

My duties included that all logistics and issues that appear during the meeting concerning the participant and all affairs related to them and the gathering were running smooth as a well oiled machine.

PEW was trying to create an INDEPENDENT commission not bound by countries policies and interests, it turned out not to be the case.

I remember waking up from a fuzzy dream that I cannot even recall and it was Monday the 9^th of February, date that the meeting was supposed to take off. Everything was set to go apart from finishing the welcome packages, something that Alex and I did rather quickly before the chairman Dr. Peter Bridgewater gave the kick off.

After a “tour de table” and everyone knew who was things started to become a bit clearer when William de la Mer gave his presentation. Most of the people seated at the commission’s table had no clue in relation to the International Whalling Commission (IWC) terms and perspectives of many background. I’m pretty sure some of them went home wandering what pelagic was and got nothing from the precautionary approach and stock (but what is a stock anyway?) management. And when things get to the complex stocks and the Cj and Co stocks things get even better. Not to mention what is the RMS (Revised Management Scheme) and so on.
My point here is that ok, I’m fond of the idea of getting some freshers to the issue and hope they find ways to break the stalemate the IWC was drowned into some years ago and still endures. But IWC is an intricate game of seduction and power that one needs a multidisciplinary perspective in order to perceive the problem in its plenitude. That is, political, scientific and economical background. On their on matters alone I have to say that it will go nowhere, even realizing that the biggest issue is the political rather than anything else, however, to circumvent that a lot of history and knowledge of IWC procedures was also needed.

Like Mário Ruivo said Global Management is a Big Problem to mankind” after saying that Portuguese society has no clue on the status of the IWC and has no involvement on the issue (very true). So in some ways I believe that the participants needed a week or so of “classes” before they could actually deliver possible solutions and hypothesis for a break-out of the conflict.

PEW established 3 different options as possible solutions for the stalemate.

A) Adopt the 1994 specification of the RMP into schedule, as part of a larger process.
B) Establish catch limits for coastal whaling (CW) using the Agreed RMP
C) Develop a new [less precautionary] management approach for coastal whaling.

For starts what is coastal whaling? Well it can be described as whaling practised on a country’s EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), or something along these lines. However the IWC has not defined CW! If Japan’s main objective is to go whaling and obtain whale meat for human consumption (however I must speak my mind saying that it is my belief that no one really knows what Japan wants…) it won’t serve the purpose of letting them any type of CW since the whales they have in the EEZ of Japan are contaminated with mercury and are a potential health hazard!

When Dr. Russel Leaper from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) gave his presentation and showed how unsustainable the coastal whaling scheme is, it made the Ambassador uneasy and it showed visible discomfort saying Dr. Leaper’s statements were biased said “look at the facts” but gave any etc.. The danger I see on the CW subject is if other countries (namely puppets of Japan) come up and issue CW permits …
After that Lorenzo Rojas (IWC Commissioner of Mexico) name very good scientific questions to Dr. Leaper that shown how CW cannot be done under the RMP.

Japan claims that many issue are out of the competence of the IWC (but even the IWC having the most incredible and reliable line-up of whale scientists it doesn’t allow its DNA database to be scrutinized by it), such as bycatch and whale-watching. Enough is to say that what seems clear is that Japan claims are to its own vested interests and not more than that!

Still in relation to the Scientific Committee (SC) of the IWC many other interrogations and issues were put forward. The SC has the stigma of lacking credibility, and providing its yearly conclusions to the Commissioners 48h prior to the meeting. How can an 800 page document be well evaluated in such a short time? The SC meeting should be made well in advance in relation to the Countries Delegations meeting.

Sue Lieberman from WWF urged the importance of decoupling science from politics and Mário Ruivo added that the IWC is “dysfunctional not in terms of science and its credibility, but in terms of governance”.
Speaking about the long standing slogan that Japan uses saying whales are a threat to food security she mentioned that food is 40%-50% what is taken from the ocean and treated as waste!!! So go figure …

I had a hard time trying to communicate with Ms. Ngoné Ndoye Senator and Mayor of Senegal, I really need to improve my French! A lovely lady with a great sense of humour, who was despaired during lunch when I couldn’0t find Tabasco for her to add to her meal!  But as a good fixer I found a full bottle just for her!

I was registering some quotes during the meeting, some that I found interesting were:

“When you open Pandora’s box you don’t know what comes out” – Peter Bridgewater

Yolanda Kakabadse made the point that if the IWC breaks down or becomes functional it will also imply that “people would have to find new jobs. Like the ones that take on countries that are non-compliant”. Here I think resides one of the big problems of IWC and why I realized that some NGOs are actually happy with the process as it is! Yolanda’s (who loves Fado) statement affects me directly since my latest work is to look at non-compliant countries, but my desire is to solve the IWC’s stalemate with a victory to whales, ensuring her place on this planet is guaranteed and move forward to another subject!

Peter Bridgewater also stated that “Madeira will be an important turning point or the death of the IWC”. I wouldn’t say it would be its death but if was to be a turning point it would make me feel very proud I must say! It was followed by Yolanda Kakabadse asking the Portuguese Secretary of Environment Humberto Rosa for “leadership on the run up to Madeira”. She also say and with much truth that “international governance is a mess!”

Barry Cohen was very emotive and I think one of those who had no country related opinion but its own. He asked for the PEW Whales Commission to “cut the bullshit approach!” and asked “how do you want to reach consensus between two opposite parts that are not going to back down on their positions?” and added the question: “Why do you keep tapping around the bush and don’t come out to the open and speak your mind?”, for much of my amusement!

He also mentioned an interesting episode that involved much emotion from the Japanese public towards animals (Japan also argues that the whaling debate is driven by emotional motives rather than rational and sustainable use of resources). Barry was the Australian Environment Minister at the time and was he who signed the first export of Koalas from Australia to Japan. He recalls it as being very emotional and the Japanese public went “nuts” when he had to give the “biggest press conference ever” in Japan and say that the Koalas would take an additional 6 months to arrive. It however turned out to be a sad story when one of the Koalas died already being in Japan and the keep committed suicide. Can you get more emotional than this?

Other subject that was discussed and I’m backing it fully is the fact that the question and way of taking Japan out of its way must be using economical factors. I discussed this with Sidney Holt asking him if the crisis would solve the whaling issue. If the subsidies were cut off to the whaling industry it would collapse in no time…

The end of the meeting was not so good with people taking on countries decisions and politics rather than speak their own mind. I think it was the reason why Peter Bridgewater was calling Jim McLay, New Zealand. It was a pity, but I take this meeting to be very positive, at least if we keep brainstorming new things will come up and we can find ways to solve the problem. However I think it could be on another way and angle, but that is another matter.

In sum, the issue is still bold to dash with loads of sticking points …

See the Chair Summary produced by the PEW Environment Group here

Check out the BBC report by Richard Black from the meeting.
Also see the TIME article by Brian Walsh: Will Killing Whales Save the World’s Fisheries?

]]> http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/02/the-fixer/feed/ 3 http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/01/pew-meeting-iwc-scandal/ http://www.frangoncalves.com/2009/01/pew-meeting-iwc-scandal/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:04:51 +0000 Chico http://www.frangoncalves.com/?p=555 Last Friday I met with Alex Garcia, an associate of the Varda Group that is organizing the PEW meeting in Lisbon, and I’ve passed from an invited observer to a local coordinator. Nice! The PEW meeting comes in a time where much discussion is abide related to the IWC and I belive it will be interesting, they will also try to congregate the Portuguese NGOs in a room and hopefully engage them into the IWC affairs!

Scandal within the IWC in again on top of the table…
“Apparently” (IFAW and I have been saying this since the IWC meeting in Chile on last July) the Bush Administration is trying to reach a deal with the Japanese to solve all the whaling issue. (We also start the meeting saying other things that turned almost everyone against us but in the end of the meeting many press releases came out saying what we badgering all along!)

Washington Post story about the attempts to craft a deal
IFAW’s press release on the secret Bush’s administration plan to legitimise Japanese whaling

NGOs are now asking President Obama to cancel all negotiations regarding this “coup d’état”.
Read Greenpeace pledge to President Obama to assert authority and replace officials

I keep saying that this year things will get very interesting, the only down side seems to be me stuffed down on a suit and tie … funny!

What would be the decisions of the Japanese to the future, go forward and build the new factory ship, which will drown us on a few more years of negotiations and political battles on the stalemate state that the IWC is at the moment… we don’t know.
What do the Japanese really want of this entire circus, do we even know? It is obvious that most of the reasons they present are total bogus … so what now?

But the question I’m maybe more interested in finding out is what will the Obama Administration do? Will they uphold all the negotiations done by Hogarth? Will they change all of it upside down? It will be interesting to see!