Cooperation and Conflict in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary

For close to fifty years, the Antarctic Treaty and its related instruments have provided a platform for cooperatively managing scientific research and ecosystem management within the treaty's boundaries, including the Southern Ocean.

Antarctic Treaty member states traditionally defer to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) when it comes to whale management issues. In 1994, IWC member states designated the waters surrounding Antarctica as the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The IWC Map shows the exact coordinates.

Japan's scientific whaling program was legally instituted in 1987, in response to the IWC moratorium on commercial whaling that took effect for the 1985/86 whaling season. The initial program, called JARPA, lasted eighteen whaling seasons, 1987/88-2004/05. Over the course of time, the Japanese research team announced their work would focus on gathering data to answer questions related to four general research goals.

In December 2006, the IWC Scientific Committee met to Review Data and Results from Special Permit Research on Minke Whales in the Antarctic.

The committee examined the data, the methods for gathering the data and the conclusions of the Japanese researches and offered a couple interpretations of the results with respect to the stated goals. Goals 1 and 4 deal generally with population assessments for the purpose of establishing scientific baselines for determining catch quotas in the event the commercial whaling moratorium is lifted. The committe concluded, "There are general unresolved issues related to estimating abundance and trends in these waters that apply not only to the JARPA data but also to the IDCR/SOWER data that require further work by the Committee."

With respect to the second goal, the committee concluded, "The Workshop also agreed that considerable relevant data had been collected by the JARPA programme on matters related to body condition and feeding. However, it is clear from the discussion under Item 5 that the simple nature of several of the analyses presented at the present Workshop means that relatively little progress has been made in addressing this objective, even allowing for the complexities of the subject."

Conflicting positions regarding Japanese scientific whaling took on a more legal tone during the 2007 meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. A majority of states agreed to an IWC Resolution that "CALLS UPON the Government of Japan to suspend indefinitely the lethal aspects of JARPA II conducted within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary."

The chairman of the meeting also noted the voting record, "40 votes in favour, 2 votes against and 1 abstention; 27 countries decided not to participate in the vote as they believed that the submission of the proposal was not conducive to building bridges within the Commission."

The Japanese government turned down the IWC request and resumed their revised scientific whaling program in the Southern Ocean, JARPA II, for the 2006/2007 season.

IWC member states plan to revisit the issue during a March 2008 meeting to discuss the FUTURE OF IWC.

© 2008. Patricia A. Michaels