Whaling, sixty years on

Things look worst everyday, two weeks before the Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), for the moratorium on commercial whaling challenged by Japan, Norway, Iceland and a myriad of countries "bought" by Japan.

[We already discussed several aspects of this issue in February and in April]

I will go to the IWC meeting in StKitts & Nevis at end of next week, after attending the UN Informal Process on the Ocean of the Law of the Sea (UNICP) earlier in New York.

I have not been at an IWC meeting since 1988. However I was given by the Pew Charitable Trusts the opportunity to review the issue in detail recently.

Who would have said in the 1970s, when we undertook the early Greenpeace campaigns, that it would take more time to stop whaling than nuclear waste dumping at sea or nuclear weapons testing?

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling that gave birth to the International Whaling Commission, three years later when it entered into force.

Sixty years represent three generations of humans and...three generations of great whales.

In those sixty years, humankind as well as the Ocean and the rest of the environment have changed considerably.

But the International Whaling Commission has not changed much...