The International Whaling Commission (IWC) met June 17-20, 2006 to determine the future status of whaling. Japan and Norway, through a judicious use of bribery and stuffing the commission with smaller countries who would vote their way, won a simple majority in favor of bringing back the commercial fishing of whales. While the IWC requires a much larger majority to bring back the whale fishery, this is a major political win for stalwart whaling nations Japan and Norway. What's odd is that whaling is a defunct fishery that has been dying as a commercial industry even in Japan and Norway. In a generation, Japan and Norway's national whale fisheries will be as dead as their current supporters. So, should we still worry about the IWC decision's effect on whales and fisheries? Yes, we should.
Japan is at the forefront of the push to bring back commercial whaling. Japan and Norway currently conduct whaling under the guise of “scientific research”. They also promulgate the myth to many smaller countries that whales eat up fish that humans eat, depleting local fisheries. Japan and Norway's main arguments are that there are already enough whales (and too many for the good of current fisheries), that their countries have a right to sustain their cultural traditions of whaling and that their populations are dependent on whaling to survive. All three of these arguments have big holes in them.
The first one is the easiest to puncture. The emotional arguments that now permeate the debate over whaling had very little to do with the ultimate demise of the whale fishery. Whaling deep-sixed for the same reason that all defunct fisheries die out - the whalers overfished themselves out of a job. Whaling originated as an extensive fishery. “Extensive” in farming means using the natural resources at hand without replacing or cultivating them except by moving elsewhere once they are depleted. In hunting or fishing, “extensive” means subsistence-level hunting with little or no commercial elements. In the 18th and 19th centuries, whaling became an intensive fishery. “Intensive” in the hunting or fishing sense means using the natural resources for commercial as well as subsistence purposes. Some fisheries can sustain an intensive focus, if those in charge of the fishery carefully manage their use. Whales, being mammals and therefore larger, less fecund and slower growing than fish, were probably never going to make for a sustainable intensive fishery. But the total lack of resource management didn't help.
The first whales hunted commercially were the Right Whales. They got their name from being the “right” whale to hunt. The first big sign that the whale fishery was in serious trouble came when Right Whales became too scarce in the North Atlantic to be commercially viable. You see, when a fishery goes down the tubes, this doesn't mean that the fishermen have hunted the fish to extinction, but only to the point where they can no longer catch enough of that species to sustain themselves economically as fishermen. So, whether or not a species is still facing extinction is a bad way of gauging whether or not that species can sustain a viable commercial fishery. The two figures are very different levels of fish populations.
After the Right Whale fishery went belly up in the North Atlantic early in the 19th century, whalers ventured south and west while also turning to larger and more dangerous whales, namely Sperm whales. If you've ever read “Moby Dick”, you know how dangerous a move this was for whalers. But that still wasn't the end of whaling. By the 20th century, larger species like Sperm, Fin and Blue whales were becoming too scarce to hunt. So, the whalers turned to smaller species, like the Minke whales that Japan and Norway currently hunt. It is an oft repeated pattern that as a fishery fails, the fishermen go after species they previously ignored. The whaling fishery was a classic case of this.
By the 1960s, when most of the world finally gave up on whaling, the whaling fishery was completely defunct as a commercial venture. Scientists working for the whaling industries in Japan and Norway would now like us to believe that whale populations, after only forty-two years, can now sustain intensive commercial fishing. But Japan and Norway give the lie to their own argument when they propose hunting species like the Fin whale, which is still on the endangered species list. You cannot sustain a fishery on a species whose numbers are so low that its very survival is in doubt. That's the point of being on an endangered species list.
It's also a given that in the wide, wide ocean, an endangered species of whale couldn't compete with humans for commercial fish species if it tried, let alone put a dent in other fisheries. Fin whales don't even eat fish. They're baleen whales, which means they eat plankton. The fisheries where Japan and Norway accuse whales (or sharks) of eating all of the commercial fish species have been depleted by humans, not whales. In other words, Japan and Norway's argument is wrong: there aren't too many whales for the safe maintenance of current fisheries; there are too many humans.
The cultural traditions surrounding whaling that Japan particularly insists on do exist, but they are rapidly fading. After WWII, the whale fishery in Japan put meat on the table for a generation of hungry Japanese living in economic crisis. However, this crisis has long since passed. Though whaling still has some support among the older generation, only 4% of Japanese still use products from the limited whale fishery that Japan already maintains. Despite intensive promotional efforts by the nationalistic elements in the Japanese government that subsidize the fishery, this percentage is actually dropping.
Not only is the whale fishery in Japan not economically necessary, it's not even popular. Japan wants to expand this troublesome and heavily subsidized fishery when it's not even selling the products from the current level of whaling. Things are no better in Norway, where concerns about PCBs in whale meat have damped Norwegian enthusiasm for whale products considerably.
Japan's whale fishery is sustained on a thin cloud of cultural pride and fear of compromise. Japan fears that if it gives in on whaling, it may find more important fisheries limited, as well. It's a legitimate fear since international fights over contested fisheries are universally nasty in nations with coasts and Japan does get a lot of its protein from its various fisheries. However, by pushing such an unpopular and unsustainable issue, Japan is building up a reservoir of international resentment, particularly among Pacific rivals Australia and New Zealand, that may result in its fisheries being limited across the board anyway.
The third argument confuses extensive with intensive fisheries. To be blunt, fishing and hunting are by nature extensive. Once you get into intensive hunting or fishing, you are edging toward disaster without judicious resource management and lots of rules and regulations. Just ask the 19th century Plains Indians when the Buffalo Hunters showed up. What this means is that no nation where the population numbers in the millions subsists mainly on either hunting or fisheries. You cannot build up a population of millions on such an uncertain food base as a single fishery. Japan and Norway are both rich nations with plenty of other resources to use, including other, less stressed, fisheries. Similarly, the nations they have wooed into the IWC, though much poorer than Japan or Norway, have much more reliable resources to depend on than whaling. Some of them don't even have national fisheries because they barely have any coastline. None of them is being hurt by a whaling ban.
Worse, these countries have terrible records in maintaining their own fisheries and poaching the fisheries of neighboring nations. They engage in harmful and wasteful practices like dumping “trash fish” and dredging. The problem with dumping trash fish is two-fold. First, today's trash fish is tomorrow's fishery mainstay. You can kill an entire future fishery just by inadvertently catching it in your net and then dumping it because you won't get a good price for it on the current market. Second, dumping a whole load of rotting fish on one section of the ocean floor can have as bad an effect on the ecology of that area as dumping the same load on a patch of land. Dredging does the opposite: instead of dumping dead fish on an area, it scrapes vulnerable seabed clean of everything there. This is like strip-mining a cornfield and has the same effect of killing a fishery by destroying the homes and food of your future catch. By funding these countries just to get their support for whaling, Japan may be shooting itself in the foot when they start poaching in Japan's waters after they've killed off their own fisheries.
A big irony is that one group of populations is being hurt by the push for commercialization of whaling specifically because it depends on extensive whaling. This group includes the Inuit (Eskimos) of Alaska, Canada and Greenland, as well as the coastal Siberians. Aboriginal or local small-scale whaling occurs in Arctic Canada, Alaska, Greenland, the Chukotka Peninsula of Siberia, the Faroe Islands, Grenada, Dominica, Saint Lucia and Lamalera in Indonesia. The American and Canadian governments allow limited aboriginal whaling among the Inuit despite their national bans on commercial whaling. Canada even pulled out of the IWC in 1982 because it refused to ban its aboriginal whale fishery.
And unlike Japan and Norway, the Inuit really do need it. Shipping food to the Arctic is expensive and the Inuit generally live in very impoverished conditions. Unlike the nations on the IWC roles, the Inuit still hunt and fish to keep food on the shelf. Inuit numbers are small enough that they have not affected the populations of the whales that they hunt, though their hunts do create a big outcry among anti-whaling activists. The Inuit use some modern technology, but nothing that raises their practices above the level of extensive fishing or hunting. Nor has their selling of whale products resulted in any large increase in whaling solely for commercial purposes. The Inuit have shown that an extensive whale fishery is now sustainable. But they've also shown why a commercial whale fishery is absolutely out of the question. Should intensive commercial whaling be allowed to return, we will see passive genocide perpetrated in the name of national pride.
This is the big irony of the whaling industry. Those countries like Japan and Norway that kick and scream and whine that they are being deprived of commercial whaling not only don't need it, their populations don't even want it. Those populations, like the Inuit, that do need whaling to survive, however, have no voice and no presence on the IWC. The very factors that make the Inuit need whaling also ensure that they have no influence over the fishery's management: they are poor, culturally demoralized and politically fragmented, being scattered across the wildernesses of several major nations. Their voice is not loud but their need is great. When we say “No” to commercial whaling we need to do so knowing that it's about a lot more than whales.
