Britain seeks ballot on Japanese whaling

Press, 26 December 1987, Page 6

Britain seeks ballot on Japanese whaling

NZPA-AP London The British Government has instructed its representative on the International Whaling Commission to demand a ballot of member States on Japanese plans to carry on whaling under a controversial research programme. The 40-nation IWC, worried by reports that some types of whales are being hunted to near extinction, adopted a fiveyear moratorium on hunting whales in 1985. But Japan, Iceland, Norway and South Korea have argued they should continue whaling under a permitted scientific research programme. Japan, where whale meat forms an important part of the national diet, and the three other countries say whaling under the research programme is necessary to assess whale stocks and breeding rates, but opponents say the programme is a pretext to carry on commercial whale hunting. “Any proposal for the killing of whales in the

name of scientific research should be subject to the most rigorous justification to the IWC,” said a junior Minister, John Gummer, of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Announcing the instruction to Britain’s IWC commissioner to demand an urgent postal ballot on demands that Japan should stop further whaling, at least until the next IWC meeting in May, Mr Gummer said Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s Government had decided to act because the Japanese fleet has sailed for the Antarctic. He said the Japanese plan to kill 300 minke whales there. An IWC source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Mon-, day that a majority of? those at a three-day meeting of the IWC’s scientific committee at Cambridge, England, last week rejected a scaled-down Japanese proposal to continue whaling for scientific research.. The source said Japan and Iceland were the only countries

among those at the meeting to argue in favor of the plan. The source said the new Japanese plan was that instead of catching 825 minke whales and 50 sperm whales this season, they would take just 300 minkes “to test the feasibility of their original proposal.” A postal vote would likely reject the Japanese proposal as only Japan, Iceland, Norway and South Korea argued to continue whaling when 29 members of the 40-nation full commission attended the annual meeting in Bournemouth, England, last June. There are 29 countries on the scientific committee and 15 of them turned up for the meeting in Cambridge, where the commission is based. The committee does riot take votes at its meetings. The IWC decided in June that whaling nations should take 1155 whales this year and. a total of 11,340 over the next 12 years. Japan was allowed 10,500 of that total.