The Observer view on Japan’s decision to resume commercial whaling

Extract from The Guardian

Opinion

Whaling

Observer editorial

With many of the great cetaceans still endangered, Tokyo’s move is depressing – and has no economic justification

Sun 30 Dec 2018 17.00 AEDT Last modified on Sun 30 Dec 2018 19.09 AEDT

Japanese fishermen process a whale carcass. Photograph: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

Whales have been hunted by humans for thousands of years. Their flesh, oil and blubber have been variously employed for food, to make wax for candles and to provide fuel for lamps. This kind of exploitation is no longer needed today. Modern society gets its protein and its lighting from other, more accessible sources. Hence the decision by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to place a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
Given that many species had already been brought close to extinction, the move was long overdue. Three decades later, the blue whale, the humpback whale, the North Atlantic right whale and many other great cetaceans are still struggling to rise out of the critically endangered state to which hunting had reduced them. Had whaling not been halted 30 years ago, many of these great creatures would no longer be swimming in our oceans. The world that we currently inhabit would have been greatly impoverished.
Given this worrying background, it is all the more difficult to understand the announcement by the government of Japan that it has decided that it will leave the IWC in June in order to resume commercial whaling the following month. By any standards, the move is depressing – and alarming. It has absolutely no economic or ecological justification and in preparing to slaughter some of the planet’s most intelligent creatures for food the plan is repugnant.

Not surprisingly, governments, scientists and wildlife groups across the planet have made clear their deep disgust at Japan’s proposed actions. Britain, Australia and New Zealand have all admonished its leaders while the conservation group the WWF rightly criticised Tokyo for acting as it has done at a time “when the planet’s whale species are under unprecedented threat from entanglement, the impacts of shipping, noise, plastic and chemical pollution, as well as climate change”.
An examination of the motives of Japan’s leaders is equally disquieting. In the past, the nation has provided itself with whale meat by exploiting a loophole in the IWC rulebook. This permits “scientific whaling” in international waters, in particular the South Atlantic. As a result, hundreds of whales have been caught there every year in the name of cetacean research. Meat from these “research” trips has then ended up in shops and restaurants. However, these South Atlantic hunts have generated a great deal of criticism from other nations and wildlife groups. As a result, Japanese whalers have been harassed by vessels operated by green activists. By moving, instead, into its own national waters, which stretch for 1.7m square miles, an area roughly equivalent to the size of India, Japan clearly hopes to do much more of its whaling on the quiet.
It remains to be seen if this move will succeed. It is also unclear if the current generation of Japanese consumers is that interested in whale meat. In the 1960s, almost a quarter of a million tonnes were sold across Japan, a figure that has since fallen to around 3,000. Indeed, much of the meat from Japan’s “scientific whaling” now ends up as pet food.

Nor is it clear how much consumers will be prepared to pay for whale meat. Japan’s “scientific whaling” trips were subsidised by its government. It is not yet obvious if their replacements – commercial whaling hunts inside national waters – will get support from government coffers. If not, whale meat will become even more expensive, a prospect that has already led specialist restaurant operators to express worries about sharp rises in price. Thus Japan will have earned itself intense global opprobrium without bringing itself any benefits at all. It will have harpooned itself in the foot. At least that is the outcome that Japan deserves and which most of the planet will now be anticipating.