Whaling commission approves quota for Natives

CAMBRIDGE, England - The International Whaling Commission has agreed to extend U.S. and Russian quotas for bowhead whales, allowing Alaska Natives and the Native people of Chukotka, Russia, to hunt 280 bowheads over the next five years.

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The action came Monday at a special meeting of the commission. The quota was the main reason for the Cambridge meeting after requests to continue subsistence whaling were rejected at the commission's annual meeting in Japan in May.

The quota allows for an annual average harvest of 51 bowheads for the United States and five for Russia.

Japan led a push last May to ban the hunting of bowhead whales by Eskimo subsistence hunters. The decision, made at the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting, was widely seen as retribution for U.S. opposition to Japanese-led efforts to lift a 1986 ban on commercial whaling. The vote was the first time since the 1970s aboriginal hunting quotas had been denied.

Chris Yates, spokesman for the U.S. delegation to the IWC, said his office talked with delegates from every commission member country to gain their support. Monday's vote was unanimous.

What changed, Yates said, was the U.S. delegation for the first time softened its stance on Japan's request to resume minke whaling off its coast.

For more than a decade, Japan has sought a quota for four traditional coastal whaling communities. The United States has been among the nations blocking it, and the proposal failed again Monday despite U.S. support.

Yates said the United States did not change its stance on commercial whaling so much as its stance on how Japan's proposed quota might be used. Before the U.S. delegation would support any new whaling venture, Japan will have to prove the whales are being taken for subsistence purposes and not for commercial sale.

In addition, he said, the commission's scientific committee will have to find the minke stocks off Japan's coast large enough to support a harvest.

In addition to the action on Eskimo subsistence whaling, the IWC readmitted Iceland to the commission. Iceland resigned a decade ago in a dispute over commercial whaling.

Iceland, a longtime dissenter from the commission's global ban, was readmitted on a vote of 19 to 18, after the island nation's delegates agreed not to resume commercial whaling at least until 2006.

Australia protested that the decision gave pro-whaling nations an extra vote in the commission's deliberations. Australia's Environment Minister David Kemp protested Iceland was still threatening to flout the ban.

"Iceland will also now be able to vote in the commission as part of the pro-whaling bloc, which will make the conservation-minded nations' task all the more difficult," Kemp said following the vote.

Iceland's Ministry of Fishing had no immediate comment.

The International Whaling Commission banned all commercial whaling in 1986.

Iceland sought to rejoin last year, saying it could best influence the whaling debate from within the organization, and was granted observer status.

Iceland's government has argued stocks of minke and fin whales in its waters are sufficient to sustain a resumption of hunting.

Norway resumed its commercial whale hunts in 1993 after a six-year break.

In rejoining the IWC, Iceland promised not to resume commercial whaling while negotiations on a revised management plan were making progress.

However, Iceland said it would not feel bound to continue observing the ban if it is not lifted, "within reasonable time after the completion of the revised management scheme."