Icelandic whaling

Commerce in disguise

Iceland's "scientific whaling" programme, like Japan's, is merely commercial whaling in disguise. Commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1982, but a loophole allows the killing of whales for research purposes.

Iceland plans to sell the products of its "research" to Japan, where whale meat generates 4 billion yen in sales annually.

While denying that they have a commercial interest in hunting whales, the Icelandic Fisheries Ministry all but apologises at its website for the fact that it is "obliged" to sell the products of its scientific whaling programme under IWC regulations and international law.

Iceland claims to be worried that whales are eating too many fish. As Icelandic Ambassador Helgi Ágústsson put it in his automated response to a Greenpeace Cyberaction:

"The annual consumption of fish, krill and other biomass by whales in this region [Iceland's 200 mile economic zone] has been estimated around 6 million metric tons, several times the total Icelandic fishery landings of 1.5 to 2.0 million metric tons."

But the Fisheries Minister has lumped "krill and other biomass" into the tonnage consumed, neither of which are harvested commercially, and which other studies indicate make up the majority of the Minke whales' diet.

If Iceland only wanted the answer to the question of how many fish whales eat, there are plenty of non-lethal means of studying whale interactions with the ocean food chain, and the argument that whales deplete fish populations is pseudo-science.

Tourism: whales are worth more alive

Iceland has been an increasingly popular tourist magnet, and a burgeoning whale watching industry has taken hold. More than 277,000 people visited Iceland in 2001.

That's almost more than the entire population of the island. It's estimated that in 2001, one third of those visitors went whale watching. Whale watching firms have sprung up in Iceland over the past decade, generating around US$8.5 million in revenue in 2001.

Commercial whaling only brought in US$3 million to US$4 million annually between 1986 and 1989, when commercial hunts were stopped.

The Icelandic Tourist Association voted in April of 2003 to strengthen its stand against whaling. One whale watching village hung its flag at half-mast when the Fisheries Ministry made its unpopular announcement.

Whaling is impacting Iceland's tourist industry in a negative way - in early 2004 whale watching bookings were down 90 percent on the year before. The chairman of the Icelandic Whale watching Association sent a letter to Icelandic MP's blaming this decrease on Iceland's whaling policy.

In June 2004 the Icelandic government announced their decision not to hunt sei and fin whales, and to cut back their quota from 500 minke whales over two years to 25 minkes this year. This decision was in response partly to "more domestic pressure than expected."

In October 2006, however, Iceland announced a small commercial whaling programme, authorizing the killing of 30 minke and 9 fin whales.

By the end of the whaling season, however, in August 2007, whalers had only caught about a third of the quota, domestic sales of the meat were nearly non-existent, and no foreign market had yet been found for the whalemeat.