This was a major victory for the voices of whale conservation
worldwide.
At last year's meeting, 33 countries - led by pro-whaling Japan
- voted in favour of the "
St. Kitts Declaration," essentially an attempt to restart
commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986.
That temporary, one-vote whaling majority was a wake up call,
and as Japan continued to recruit votes in support of their
position, often with lucrative aid packages, Greenpeace and other
conservation organisations, like-minded countries, and whale
supporters all over the world responded with their own efforts to
ensure that the true opposition to whaling worldwide was reflected
at this year's meeting.
We launched a website dedicated to enabling those who opposed
whaling to be part of those efforts: I-GO/Defending the
whales. Whale defenders who signed up at that site helped to
motivate countries around the world to protect the whales. Recent
months saw several countries joining or rejoining, like Peru,
Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Greece, Costa Rica and Ecuador - or even
declaring they would swap sides to vote for the whales, like
Nicaragua.
In addition, there were Big Blue Marches all over the world in support
of whales - in New Zealand and Australia, India, Argentina,
Ecuador, Netherlands, Peru, Spain, US, UK, France, Portugal,
Columbia, Venezuela, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile,
Mexico, Morocco, Romania, Sweden, Singapore, Turkey - the list goes
on and on!
And in Japan, the Whale Love
Wagon reached out to the Japanese public in a very different
voice, exploring the whaling issue from the perspective of former
whalers, 
people who
still eat whale meat, and Japanese youth. The latest instalment, an
animation from academy-award nominee Koshi Yamamura, tells the
story of a Japanese headmaster who saves a whale, repaying a debt
he feels for the days when whales saved the Japanese people from
starvation following World War II. "Once they saved us -- now it is
our turn to save them" he says in this tiny, beautiful
story.
What we didn't win
Yet while we achieved the major objective of maintaining the
moratorium, the meeting was not entirely a success. The functional
extinction of an entire species, the Baiji
dolphin, - got just fifteen minutes of fame at the meeting, at
the Anchorage's Captain Cook Hotel, which has just drawn to a
close.
The Vaquita, the Mexican dolphin likely to become
extinct in the near future, also garnered little mention. And there
was no discussion whatsoever about the estimated 3,288 cetaceans
that have died as bycatch from fishing vessels worldwide since the
59th IWC meeting started four days ago, or through human causes
like ship strikes, pollution, bycatch and climate change.
Instead, a huge chunk of meeting was spent arguing over the
resumption of commercial whaling, with Japan's JARPA II "scientific
whaling" hunt later this year drawing censure from most countries.
Japan aims to kill 50 threatened humpback whales in the Southern
Ocean later this year, and the "Resolution on Jarpa" with 40 countries voting
against Japan's "research" expeditions - which are really just
commercial whaling in disguise.
Japan also proposed a resolution that its coastal whaling
communities should be allowed to engage in commercial whaling,
because of its similarity to subsistence hunts by indigenous people
in other countries. The problem is, for the last decade, the UN has
repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, requested Japan's government to
recognise the rights of Japan's own indigenous people - the
Ainu - in the north of Japan, so it's hard to see how they can
claim empathy with indigenous people elsewhere. Japan eventually
withdrew the proposal.
Sore losers
Japan routinely threatens to leave the IWC every year that it
doesn't go well for them, and this year was no exception. This year
they said they want to start another whaling organisation, and to
start coastal whaling.
Jun Hoshikawa, executive director of Greenpeace Japan said that
this was just posturing by Japan.
"Japan can't just walk away - whaling isn't such a big business
in Japan that other important international relationships can be
compromised".
The meeting, IWC 59, kicked off on Monday with Japan requesting
everyone to act "civilly." That sentiment didn't go too far - there
was soon a wave of so-called "hate votes" - the refusal of
pro-whaling countries to participate in votes they didn't like the
look of; threats to walk away from the whole process from Japan,
and an almost total failure of all members to consider in detail
the real threats to whales and dolphins.
Finally, the IWC's member nations have agreed to a special
meeting to discuss reform of the organisation. But unless "reform"
means actually modernising the IWC to properly address the major
threats to cetaceans - which kill one animal every 90 seconds - and
stop the most preventable cause - hunting - then that meeting will
just become another soapbox for political grandstanding, where the
only victims will be the whales.
Read the full text of the "CITES Resolution" (pdf).