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Opening Statement of the Sierra Club to
the 55th Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission
Berlin, Germany - June 2003
The Sierra Club appreciates the opportunity to participate as an observer at this 55th meeting of the International Whaling Commission, and thanks the German government and the City of Berlin for their hospitality.
Sierra Club continues to oppose any return to commercial whaling. Although some whale species seem to be recovering from the period of industrial-level exploitation, many other species and populations have not recovered to anything like their historical numbers, and several remain severely endangered. The state of our knowledge about the life-cycle of whales remains wholly inadequate to underpin decisions about where and how many whales might be legally killed.
All of the ocean’s creatures, including whales, are threatened today by a variety of environmental and man-made processes. These include increasingly serious pollution of many kinds, climate change, increasing ship traffic, and mounting levels of undersea noise. Commercial industrial fishing at unsupportable levels has harmed stocks of prey species for both human and marine mammals and subjects marine mammals to often-fatal interactions with fishing gear. What is needed is not more “scientific research” that requires whale carcasses, but a wide-ranging program of nonlethal research into how whales spend their lives, hear, communicate, find mates, reproduce, age, and die of natural causes, contributing their essential nutrients to the marine environment, as well as how they are affected by all of the environmental changes that affect their well-being. We need to understand far better their roles in the complex ocean food web, and cynical arguments that whales are responsible for crashing fish populations throughout the world’s oceans offer no positive contribution to solving fisheries problems.
Sierra Club continues to support the hunting of a limited number of whales by aboriginal groups, only for the subsistence of the families involved, and with careful management by native authorities, the relevant national government, and the IWC. The small number of nations currently taking hundreds of whales and thousands of small cetaceans each year under loopholes of the Convention fail to demonstrate the commitment to conservation that would reassure opponents that their actions would not further endanger an animal brought so close to extinction in our time.
Sierra Club warmly supports creation of the sanctuaries proposed for the South Pacific and South Atlantic regions, and continues to support enthusiastically those sanctuaries already in place. It calls upon all IWC members to respect those sanctuaries.
If, despite the opposition of so much of the world’s population, a return to IWC-managed whaling should become a reality, the Sierra Club is deeply committed to ensuring that it should be underpinned by a solid compliance regime that includes:
100% monitoring of all hunts by international observers responsible to the IWC.
A DNA registry and inspection under IWC auspices to ensure that all whale products sold were legally caught.
Thus, we support efforts by those members of the IWC working hard to ensure that any Revised Management Scheme contains these and other elements to ensure compliance with IWC rules. We know from the hundreds of thousands of unreported whales killed during the post World War II period that any RMS that does not contain these elements is a recipe for another disaster for the world’s whales.
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