Source: The International Harpoon, No. 3, October 24,1997
In a landmark decision yesterday, the IWC granted the US and the Russian Federation a joint quota of 620 gray whales for five years - with an annual maximum of 140 gray whales.
This means that within these limits, the Makah people on the Northwest coast of the USA can, as from 1 January 1998, re-establish their age-old whaling traditions and take an annual average of 4 gray whales, with an IWC consensus recognition of their traditional aboriginal subsistence and cultural needs. This same recognition has also been extended to the people of Chukotka in the Russian Federation, both for their hunt of gray whales and the reestablishment of their traditional use of bowhead whales, as well as to the Greenlanders, who had their quota of West Greenland minke whales increased with a swift bang of the Chairman's gavel on Wednesday.
Not many delegations questioned the cultural significance of gray whales for the Makah people, but their nutritional needs were the subject of several interventions expressing serious doubt, as if culture and diet are entirely separate issues for the Makah, as distinct from the Greenlanders and the Russians. This need "hasn’t existed for 71 years or longer", said the New Zealand Commissioner, Jim MacLay. Having visited the Makah people in Neah Bay and seen "... at first hand the local conditions", he told the Commission confidently and with great authority that he "failed to find the nutritional need" in this request.
The doubts of the self-appointed "cultural experts" will be recorded in the written records of the IWC for future generations of New Zealanders, Brits, Australians, Mexicans - and everyone else - to ponder over. Despite this, the Makah, the Chukotkans and the Greenlanders can leave Monaco, happy in the knowledge that they have some friends in the "international community" aka the 32 countries present to vote at the IWC this year.
Not so the Japanese. Japan’s 10-year long attempt to convince a majority of IWC members of the cultural needs of their four traditional whaling communities and accept an interim relief quota of 50 minke whales has once again fallen on deaf ears, although somewhat fewer than in previous years. If Japan were to follow the suggestion of Monaco and "recast its request under the IWC’s Aboriginal Whaling Scheme", they would no doubt only be told by New Zealand, whose Commisioner has also acquired the necessary "first-hand" experience of Japanese whaling communities, that their request did not fulfil the criterion of "continuous nutritional need" - thanks, of course, to the IWC.