From SIDNEY HOLT
By Bravo, Jeremy Cherfas, for being the first journalist to get the
new quota-setting rules of the International Whaling Commission about right.
But whoever wrote the title of his article (‘Whalers win the numbers game’,
11 July) managed to miss the point entirely. It is the ex-whaling and non-whaling
countries in the IWC that, if any, have ‘won’ the game. The new rules take
the existing uncertainty about the biology of baleen whales sufficiently
well into account to allow the catch limits set under them, when not zero,
to be so small by the whalers’ standards that the North Atlantic whalers
hate them. That’s why Iceland left, and Norway is now cocking a snook at,
the IWC.
Norway fought for years against having any new rules, having done nicely,
thank you, under the old ones. Iceland decided to leave as soon as the
IWC agreed last year, in principle, to Justin Cooke’s algorithm. The governments
of both countries were upset that the majority of countries adopted the
rules; their hope was that the majority would find an excuse to reject them
and so expose themselves to the renewed accusation that non- and ex-whalers
were procrastinating.
Cherfas quotes Icelandic scientist Johann Sigurjonsson as saying, with
respect to the commercial whaling moratorium, ‘Iceland manages cod, all
the time revising the management procedure, but we don’t stop catching cod
while we are revising.’ The day I read that I also read, in fishing industry
magazines, that cod fishing in the western North Atlantic has been stopped
completely for 18 months, because of management errors, and for the same
reason Iceland has had to cut dramatically its own cod catches. A difference
is, of course, that fish populations such as cod can recover substantially
in a couple of years, while whales need several decades.
The fact is that the commercial whaling moratorium has provided the
conditions under which it was feasible for a few scientists to put all their
energy into trying to devise fail-safe management rules. The present continuation
of it likewise can in theory provide the conditions for negotiating, for
the first time in whaling history, effective international arrangements
for monitoring and enforcing the implementation of the new rules. Unfortunately
the Norwegian authorities, in particular, are as anxious to avoid successful
negotiations of that kind as they have been to avoid agreement on safe quota-setting
rules.
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Sidney Holt Citta della Pieve, Italy
