ENVIRONMENT-AUSTRALIA: Anti-Whalers Take Campaign to Japan

• by Stephen de Tarczynski (melbourne)
• Monday, December 15, 2008
• Inter Press Service

Neither Australia nor Greenpeace will be sending vessels to the Southern Ocean this year.

'We believe that we need to focus all our efforts in Japan at the moment and things outside of that arena will only distract our focus,' says Reece Turner, whales campaigner with Greenpeace Australia Pacific.

Greenpeace is changing tact this year in an effort to bring greater pressure to bear on Japanese whalers, currently heading to the Southern Ocean for the start of the hunting season.

Turner says that while Greenpeace, in nine of the past twenty years, has monitored and hampered the activities of Japanese whaling vessels, 'at the moment where it’s all happening is in Japan’’.

The catalyst for this alternative focus, Turner told IPS, was the exposure in May by Greenpeace activists of allegedly embezzled whale meat being sold on the black market by crew members from the whalers’ factory vessel, Nisshin Maru.

While the two activists involved were arrested and are due to face trial in Japan early next year on charges of stealing whale meat, Turner argues that the scandal has put Japan’s whaling industry in the spotlight.

'That has really precipitated enormous interest in the issue and questions are being asked that have never been asked before,' he says.

Greenpeace says that this has coincided with a drop in public support in Japan for the country’s whaling program. The environmental organisation says that 71 percent of Japanese are against it.

Additionally, recent media reports have announced the imminent closure of Tokyo’s Yushin restaurant due to financial reasons. Designed to promote whale meat consumption, Yushin is purportedly owned by Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research, a non-profit organisation responsible for the country’s study of whales.

Greenpeace also says that the crew of the whaling fleet is not entirely Japanese -- a first for the fleet if the environmentalists’ information is accurate -- which they argue is a result of adverse publicity for the industry stemming from the ongoing whale meat scandal.

According to Greenpeace, the whaling fleet’s refuelling ship, Oriental Bluebird, has also been de-flagged by Panamanian authorities. The ship is registered in Panama.

'If they’re not able to get a refuelling vessel within a really short space of time then they’re only able to take half the quota of whales that they wanted to,' says Turner.

Nevertheless, this season whalers plan to catch around 1,000 whales, most of which will be minke, although 50 fin whales will also be targeted. For the second successive season, Japan will refrain from hunting humpback whales.

Although a moratorium on commercial whaling was implemented by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986, Japan uses a loophole in the agreement to undertake what it says is 'scientific' whaling.

And while the Institute of Cetacean Research insists that information garnered from whaling in the Antarctic means 'that we now know more about the status of whale stocks and whale biology,' environmentalists like Greenpeace, as well as governments around the world, including Australia’s, regard Japanese scientific whaling as a pretext to enable commercial whaling.

The Australian government -- which sent a customs ship, the Oceanic Viking, to monitor whalers in the Southern Ocean last season -- will not, like Greenpeace, be directly monitoring whalers this time.

The government says that the ship achieved its goals last season.

'The Viking successfully completed its mission earlier this year. We said we would monitor the whaling activities and we did and it gathered the high quality video and photographic evidence for possible use in international legal action,' said Environment minister Peter Garrett last month in an interview with ABC radio.

Instead, Australia will be focusing its efforts on its own scientific research into whales -- which, unlike Japan’s program, will be non-lethal -- as well as on diplomacy.

With the Rudd government insisting that all options remain open to it in order to bring an end to Japan’s scientific whaling program, Garrett recently revealed an initial AUD 6.15 million (41.1 million US dollars) fund to kick-start the country’s non-lethal research plan, the Southern Ocean Research Partnership (SORP).

'Australia does not believe that we need to kill whales to understand them. Modern day research uses genetic and molecular techniques, as well as satellite tags, acoustic methods and aerial surveys, rather than grenade-tipped harpoons,' said the minister in a statement in November.

The genesis of the SORP was announced in June at the IWC meeting in Santiago.

Australia has invited all nations -- including Japan and other pro-whaling countries, Norway and Iceland -- to join it in the program, for which it has high hopes.

'The Australian-led Southern Ocean Research Partnership is a ground-breaking new model for coordinated regional non-lethal whale research. This will be the first truly international, multidisciplinary research collaboration that will focus on improving the conservation of whales,' said Garrett.

In October, the government also announced the appointment of Sandy Holloway -- former head of the Sydney Olympics Organising Committee -- to the post of Special Envoy for Whale Conservation. The plan, part of what the government refers to as a comprehensive strategy to end commercial and scientific whaling, is to use diplomacy to further dialogue with Japan.

But although both Greenpeace and the Australian government have shifted their anti-whaling activities away from the high seas, Japan’s whalers will still have to contend with the more militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) in Antarctic waters over the coming months.

While SSCS founder and president, Captain Paul Watson -- also a founding member of Greenpeace -- argues that Greenpeace has abandoned the whales by deciding not to send a vessel, Turner insists that whalers are still in for a difficult time this season.

Japan’s whalers 'are in the worst position they’ve been for many years in terms of resourcing the fleet and in terms of the public relations side of the whaling industry,' argues Turner.

© Inter Press Service (2008) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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