Japan Backs Icelandic Whaling Progress Concerns

Commissioner Stefan Asmundsson, Icelandic Delegation

Iceland takes part in this Press Conference to highlight our concerns over the lack of progress that has been made this year – and for the last 10 years – on completing the Revised Management Scheme.

The RMS should be the most important priority for the Whaling Commission. Unfortunately, to some members it’s not.

Iceland has a very strong mandate to complete the RMS – the main reason we have re-joined the Whaling Commission is to contribute towards completing the management framework for sustainable commercial whaling.

While we have no immediate plans to begin, our long-term aim is to conduct commercial whaling. Our hope is to do that within the management framework of the Whaling Commission. Completion of the RMS, therefore, is of central importance to us.

We believe that completion of the RMS must be the central focus, too, of the IWC. Anything that destroys this overriding objective is counterproductive to normalizing the Whaling Commission.

Iceland believes this organisation is presently failing in its duty to bring about the orderly development of the whaling industry – to manage sustainable commercial whaling – as set out in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW).

When we talk about “normalization” we are talking about “controlled, sustainable whaling”, which will not in anyway be detrimental to the world’s whale stocks.

Sustainability is the key to all conservation efforts. Unfortunately, sustainable utilization has been omitted from the so-called Berlin Initiative, which underneath is more about total protection of whale stocks regardless of their abundance.

Enough time has been wasted with proposals like this, as well as sanctuaries and other initiatives based on animal rights rather than marine mammal management and genuine environmental concerns. For example, banning all whaling regardless of stock abundance is an animal rights issue, not an environmental one.

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