Japan is poised to take advantage of a historic slim majority of pro-whaling countries at next week's International Whaling Commission meeting to push through changes in how the commission operates, to the dismay of the Australian Environment Minister, Ian Campbell. Decisions by Cambodia, the Marshall Islands and Guatemala to join the 69-nation commission appear to have tilted the balance of power towards Japan.

The Japanese Government has foreshadowed that it will try to "normalise" the commission; in other words, to treat whales like fish or any other marine resource. It wants to change the rules for meetings to allow secret ballots, scrap talks on pro-conservation issues and attack environmental groups that mounted "very dangerous" protests last summer against Japan's Antarctic scientific whaling operations.

"This confirms our worst fears," Senator Campbell said, as he conceded that the numbers appeared to be slipping away from the pro-conservation lobby in the commission. He said several countries could still join, right up to the eve of the meeting, which opens in the West Indian nation of St Kitts and Nevis on Friday. Israel has said publicly it will join the anti-whaling side but is yet to do so.

"It appears we could be faced with the prospect that the conservation majority could be lost to countries with no interest in whales, and no chance to get across the issues," Senator Campbell said.

Japan's whaling fleet gets around the international moratorium on commercial whaling by arguing that its operations are scientific research, not commercial catches. Japanese whalers take up to 1365 whales a year, many of them in the Australian Antarctic Territory. Last summer it added endangered fin whales to its minke whale catch, and in the summer of 2007-08 it will harpoon humpbacks that migrate along Australia's eastern and western coasts in winter.

The number of humpbacks seen off the east coast is booming, a far cry from the 1960s, when numbers fell to as few as 300 animals because of indiscriminate and illegal whaling by the then Soviet Union. A University of Queensland whale specialist, Mike Noad, said he expected about 8500 to migrate up the coast this winter. The 51 per cent simple majority on the commission appears to be tipping towards the pro-whaling lobby for the first time since before the ban came into force 20 years ago.

Although removing the moratorium would take a majority of 75 per cent, Japan has outlined some of the next steps it intends to take towards this goal in its formal agenda for next week's meeting.

source: www.smh.com.au