EIA: Uncovering the Uncovered

"The Animal Detectives has uncovered dirty business in the Arctic, announces the BBC Wildlife Magazine in its April edition." But the EIA were not the first to tell the world about whale meat fed to foxes in Arctic Russia. It was an danish journalist - and an Inuit organisation.

At the UNCED Conference in Rio, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference distributed the booklet "Inuit Whaling" which contained an article by the Danish environmental journalist, Erik Sander, which had earlier appeared in the magazine Arctic. The opening paragraph reads: "Thanks to subsistence hunting quotas for aboriginal people, the operators of fur farms in Russia's Chukotka never have to worry about what to feed their charges." Sander's article informed the environmental community present in Rio that between fifty and seventy grey whales are caught every year in addition to 300 to 400 walruses and perhaps as many as 1000 seals of various species.

"Part of each whale winds up in fifty-gallon cans as whale oil, processed in an officially "non-existent" shore-based whaling station. But only a tiny portion of the meat from the thirty-ton greys is used as food for human beings - the ostensible reason for harvesting the whales at all", writes Sander. He contacted the IWC for a comment and reports that "the IWC is not concerned that this commercial use of whale meat violates the principle of subsistence quotas". But Sander himself is concerned, even though he points out that the harvest level is not a threat to the grey whale stock. "Carried out in the guise of subsistence hunting, the grey whale slaughter casts a long shadow over the legitimate harvest practises of aboriginal people in Russia and throughout the circumpolar world", concludes Sander, and places the responsibility with the communist bureaucracy in Moscow who conceived the idea of setting up a fox farming industry in Chukotka.

Also for the record: the High North Alliance newsletter, High North News, published the Sander story back in 1992.