Whale season starts

An annual whale hunt starts. Hunt for solutions to the whale policy impasse, I mean.

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission is taking place in the next two weeks. I'm leaving for Madeira early next week to take part.

Although it is unlikely there will be any breakthrough this year [that's likely to be a transitional meeting], you'll read more and more stuff about whale conservation in the next couple of weeks.

The Pew Statement to the IWC Meeting was released yesterday.

Richard Black has also put up an interesting piece about massive violations of whaling regulations by the former Soviet Union, which he picked up from on-going discussions at this week's meeting of the IWC Scientific Committee. The Soviet Union is History, but of course it shows that estimates of past depletion are often guesstimates. And of course it's also worrying to think that in the old days, international control between the large whaling fleets was limited to an observer exchange scheme between...the USSR and Japan.

According to a press report from yesterday, South Korea will say again next week that if an arrangement was found that allows Japan to catch whales along their coasts in exchange for abandoning "scientific whaling", Seoul will try and get some of that whale cake too.

Whale season starts...