Some readers of my blogs about whaling and the current mania for deals, compromises, appeasement, capitulation, and consensus may have been surprised - even, perhaps, offended - by my comparisons with the Munich sell-out of 1938. So I should explain.

Firstly, the 1982/86 "moratorium" was not the prime cause of the near complete pause in commercial whaling, globally. It confirmed the already agreed protections status of all the baleen whales in the southern hemisphere - except the Southern minke - which comprised, originally, about three quarters of all baleen whales. It also ensured that those and other catch limits would not, for some time to come, be subject to whimsical annual ups and downs. Secondly, it aimed at halting the "mining" also of the minke whale under quotas with practically no scientific basis. And it halted baleen whaling in the Northern hemisphere also under a series of catch limits with practically no scientific foundation. The sperm whale was unconditionally and indefinitely already protected everywhere, since 1981. The moratorium also released the IWC scientists from the onerous, I'd say ridiculous, practice of trying - increasingly unsuccessfully - to make assessments and advise on catch limits for every single whale "stock"  (a notional phrase, not a scientific one) every year, a labour put on them by the terms of the 1974 decision a real compromise - that launched the IWC's New Management Procedure, in force since 1976.

The terms of the moratorium are quite clear in all the documentation of 1982. Consideration would be given to amending it when two conditions had been fulfilled. First, that there was in place a reliable management scheme that would ensure that any resumed commercial whaling would be sustainable and would be such as to allow depleted stocks to increase to optimal levels, not merely to get out of danger of extermination. Second, that depleted stocks had been shown to be recovering and the disrupted ecosystems of which they were important parts reconstructing themselves - especially in the Southern Ocean. Reinforcing and ensuring the eventual fulfillment of this second condition was one of the main purposes of designating the Southern Ocean as a whale sanctuary, in 1994.

Neither of those conditions has yet been fulfilled. The Scientific Committee, released from its other thankless tasks has devised and tested a Revised Management Procedure that is applicable to baleen whales when being exploited on their feeding grounds. And only to those. But the Commission has so far completely failed to agree on the equally necessary arrangements for ensuring compliance of whaling nations with regulations. As to stock recovery, we now know that some populations of some species have begun to increase since 1982 - examples are some populations of humpbacks and blue whales in the Antarctic. But none of those, all of which were extremely depleted, are anywhere near to optimal levels - however those might be defined - and therefore ready for consideration as targets of resumed whaling. Furthermore, one reason for the meagerness of our knowledge about all this is that since 1973, and continuing after 1986, the Scientific Committee has spent virtually all the energy it devotes to stock assessments on counting minke whales in the Antarctic - with an early lifting of the moratorium in mind - rather than on the bigger picture.

In the period of running down large-scale whaling, beginning in 1963, by my count fifteen whaling countries not only paused their operations, but ended them, and five of those cessations were responses to the 1982 decision. That was one of the solid consequences of the moratorium and the increasingly reliable scientific assessments of the remaining, most threatened stocks.

In the meantime new influences on the health of whale populations - real, but so far not strictly quantifiable - have arisen and have to be taken into account before whaling is resumed, if at all. These have been noted many times - climate change, exploitation of their food organisms, pollution and so on. And lastly new "uses" of whales by humans have grown - whale-watching in particular - and we have learned much more about what exceptional, special, sentient creatures they are. These new interests conflict sharply with killing them, even for food.

Now, to arrive at this understanding untold years have been spent by thousands - of people throughout the decades since it began to be accepted that the whales - not to say the industries based on their exploitation, which was and still is a sort of mining, not sustainable use - were in serious trouble because of "modern" commercial whaling; let's say since the 1960s. It has engaged many of the best professionals in various disciplines - biology, mathematics, law, economics and social sciences, etc. The current negotiations seem to be set on throwing all that away, casually and carelessly, wantonly, all not to bring the three remaining whaling countries to accept and honour modern international norms for use of the marine Commons, but simply to reward them for their persistence in flouting those norms.

Let me be more specific. The Chairman's Support Group is about to unleash, it is said, a table of numbers, kill figures that will be held for ten years. Those numbers have not been calculated by the IWC's Scientific Committee, but conjured from the air using, in some cass a travesty of the Committee's RMP; to be applied for a decade without the security of a compliance system; just, so far, words.

The very least that should be done, if everyone wants to continue talking, is to put those proposals to the Scientific Committee and also ask it to look at the other issues than mere numbers. When this was tentatively suggested during the IWC's Small Working Group Meeting in Florida last month the Secretariat's Director of Science actually answered, amazingly, that the Committee was too busy to do that! If the IWC's old Technical Committee were to be resurrected it could be asked to look at the operational and economic issues arising from a resumption of full-scale whaling before whale populations have recovered to optimal levels. I think the most important of these is the question of whether exploitation of baleen whales, if permitted at precautionary, biologically sustainable levels, can be economically sustainable? It never has been. It has been extremely profitable - for some - but only because treated as a mining industry, not as a harvesting operation - pardon me for using the term so beloved of the pro-whaling lobby.

So, as the recent news headline said, the proposed appeasement of the three remaining whaling countries is indeed a betrayal of all those persons, governments and organizations that have worked for decades to "save the whales", even if, for some, that meant, eventually, saving whaling. It is also a betrayal of the interests of future human generations that the IWC was also established to serve.

Some of the details of the Support group's suggestions are far worse than they might seem, superficially. The general idea is a binding statement, in the Schedule of the ICRW, which over-rides all other provisions, not just the moratorium, which is of course bad enough, but all other regulations - the sperm whaling moratorium , the moratorium on factory-ship whaling (except for minke whales, so killing fin and humpback whales in the Southern Ocean would be authorized), the sanctuary provisions. So the deal potentially turns all commercial whaling into something resembling "scientific" whaling, which over-rides all provisions including those against killing calves, submitting data etc. Whew! BIG deal!

I'll end with a bit of personal history, which I'm perhaps entitled to do because I have been engaged in these matters longer, I think, than practically anyone still living. As a fisheries scientist working for the UN I was dragged into the whaling issue in 1960.  With other scientists much more eminent and competent than I,  I worked to try to show how the Antarctic whaling industry could be saved by drastically reducing the catch limits then being set, which had absolutely no scientific basis. In those years, right through to the late 1970s I saw how the representatives of practically all the whaling countries in the IWC paid lip service to good management but said they had made investments that had to be justified, bank loans that had to be repaid with interest, cheated on regulations and international trade rules, fiddled the few scientific data and put out fake "science" (The ICR documentation on whales-eating-our-fish is a case in point), ruthlessly exploited loopholes in the ICRW whenever they felt the need, threatened - and sometimes did - walk out of the IWC if they did not get their way and the quotas they wanted and thought they deserved.

Thus I became, over the years, radicalized. When Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd ships harassed whaling vessels and prevented them from killing all the whales they had decided to kill, I applauded. I could see no other way in which this drive to make just a bit more money out of the few remaining Great Whales could be halted. Now, in their desperation, the Japanese factory-ship fleet has decided to play hard-ball. They deliberately rammed and sunk a New Zealand flagged SSCS vessel in freezing Antarctic waters last season and turned water-cannon on its crew as they leapt overboard; then later rammed and damaged the hull of the vessel rescuing them. Then they have the temerity to make the participants in a serious conference in Florida sit and watch their "digitally enhanced" version of events, while the protestors against their activity are allowed no hearing or defence.

Enough is enough! Negotiations should continue, of course, as always, but towards a real compromise such as a phase-out agreement over a reasonable time period, as was allowed with respect to the 1982 moratorium decision - two or three years.

(originally posted on April 18th, 2010, www.mywhaleweb.com)