Update from IWC 2007

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has now begun in Anchorage and dominating this year's agenda is the five-year renewal of native subsistence hunt quotas, especially endangered bowhead whales for Alaskan Eskimos. The pro-whalers have threatened to block these and are trying to force the US to trade the bowhead quota for the lifting of the whaling ban for Japanese coastal commercial hunts.

There are worrying proposals to create a Southern Hemisphere whale sanctuary that would extend the existing IWC Southern Ocean Sanctuary in Antarctic waters north to the equator. This proposal effectively halves an existing global whale sanctuary which is the existing ban on commercial whaling worldwide and also raises the question that northern hemisphere whales will be the subject of a trade off, and that commercial whaling by Japan, Norway and Iceland, and a host of other countries will resume.

Killing methods have also been discussed and many delegations, led by the UK, expressed their concern at the whalers' refusal to provide information on times to death for hunted whales. In one instance last year a minke whale killed by Greenlandic whalers took 2.5 hours to die.

New Zealand and Australia have appealed to Japan to drop their plans to add 50 humpback whales to their 'scientific' whaling programme in Antarctica although the country will still slaughter some 850 minke whales 'for research' this year in Antarctica. Hundreds more whales in the north-Pacific, including minke, brydes, sei and sperm whales could also be killed, all allegedly for 'research'.

On a brighter note, Japan has lost the voting majority that it gained in St Kitts last year.