Ocean Sentry
(from ndtv) The members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) on Monday informally agreed to maintain the moratorium on whale hunting without pressing forward with any new measures to protect cetaceans.
“”Nobody wants to vote on anything,”” official delegates and representatives of environmental organizations said at the meeting in Santiago.
The commission could not even achieve unanimity in their reaction to a scientific report on methods to measure whale populations.
The commission informally agreed not to consider votes on any measures and instead said it would try to reach a consensus by 2009, so that perhaps its members could vote on concrete proposals then.
The move appeared to confirm that none of the blocs at the conference had enough votes to change the status quo, despite technical studies that appeared to show whale populations have decreased in numbers.
Japanese delegate Joji Morishita in pressing for a lifting of the whaling ban said ”many whale soand stocks are abundant, they are rising and recovering.”
”The number of Minke whales (some 760,000) is high enough to allow a sustainable use,” Morishita argued.
