Having recently returned from Japan I feel my love of the ‘whaling’ debate returning. I always liked this debate for two reasons, its pretty interesting, with a good level of complexity, and secondly Dan Celm (whom 3 of you remember, but trust me was both talented and funny) always made fun of me for wanting to "Save the whales man!" and I vowed to get good enough to wipe the smile off his pretty face...

To be moderately serious for just one or two paragraphs, whaling is a very common topic, an important and current issue in conservation and a topic that is generic, in that if you understand this debate you can also survive many other similar conservation debates (for instance, the ivory trade) so it’s a good one to learn early.

The status quo is that since 1986 there has been an international ban on the commercial hunting of whales, which prior to the ban had been a fairly large industry, producing oils from the whale blubber and whale meat for consumption. An organization was created to administer the ban - the International Whaling Commission (IWC) - and pretty much since day one a block of countries has tried to overturn the ban. Australia once had a sizeable whaling industry because there used to be shitloads of whales in our waters. Now Oz supports the ban because only Mimi MacPherson can find any whales.

The simple truth is that whales were once abundant, but now many species are highly endangered. Since whales don’t fight wars, and to the best of my knowledge, don’t get AIDS, I guess it must have been the harpoons that killed so many of them. But the issue is more complicated for two reasons: views on how to best conserve endangered species have changed somewhat since the highpoint of the ‘green’ movement in the 80’s, and Japan is really, really, ridiculously rich and wealthy Japanese love to eat whale-meat, just love the stuff (oh and rich bastards in Norway and Iceland are basically the same too).

Even before the ban came into force things got dirty. The trio of vicious, whale-hating, murder-states (Japan, Norway and Iceland) made sure that the IWC convention was full of loopholes they could exploit. Firstly they got an exemption for indigenous communities to continue their twisted cultural practices regarding the consumption of whales (I’m mostly talking about Pacific Island states here), which established the principle that eating whales is ok - a crucial concession by the good guys. Secondly, and importantly, it’s also cool to kill whales for "scientific purposes", and this is pure fucken genius, seriously. Japan, in particular, which has a friggin' HUGE fisheries industry says it needs to study whales so it can assess the sustainability of their populations and their impact on the marine biosphere, blah blah blah.

A classic example of this ‘research’ was the recent announcement by Japanese scientists that they had proof that a species of whale that was not thought to be carnivorous is in fact a meat eater. To prove that they had to kill a few hundred whales and examine the content of their stomaches (and you think your job is crap sometimes) and after that examination was over the left overs were sold to restaurants.

Basically they argue they need to monitor how much krill and other shit the whales are eating because that impacts on the lifecycles of the fish populations in Japanese waters.

Why this is so clever is because its so open-ended and scientific sounding. Japan slaughters about 2000 whales a year to "study them" and then has to find a way to get rid of the mountains of dead whale that their homework creates, so guess what they do with it? They sell it of course! Clever, clever Japanese! (I love you Masako if you’re reading this.)

In addition to their cunning efforts to weaken the treaty, Japan has also paid squillians in foreign aid to poor-arse pacific states who after signing such enormous deals, miraculously start voting with the Trio to have the ban lifted by the IWC. In January Kiribati became the 59th member of the IWC, and having received $100m in aid from Japan since 1980, try to guess how they will vote at IWC? Here’s a hint: I bet they’ll vote much like their neighbour Tuvalu who soaked up millions in Japanese foreign aid to build a secondary school, a hospital and (wait for it!) a fisheries harbour and after Tuvalu joined the IWC in 2002 it sat right behind Japan and voted to massacre more innocent, peaceful, hippy whales.

Adding Kiribati to the IWC family means that for the first time there are a majority of members who support the commercial hunting of whales. Luckily the anti-whaling nations weren’t totally stupid when they drafted the convention so it requires a 75% approval to overturn the ban before the moratorium is defeated, phew... Also the good guys are fighting fire with water (fighting fire with fire just doesn’t make sense to me) by signing up civilised nations to also join the IWC, including (and this cracks me up) Hungary, which is totally landlocked and soon apparently Luxemburg is joining, which is also a country without any maritime boundaries whatsoever. Take that, dirty Iceland, Norway, Japan and Kiribati!