Britain fights Japan's bid to control whaling commission

[Algorem]

Source: The Independent

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2452383.ece

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Published: 16 April 2007

Britain has led an anti-whaling fightback against Japan's attempts to take control of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and scrap the international ban on commercial hunting of the great whales.

A British diplomatic campaign has led to six nations joining the IWC - countries who in May will vote with the anti-whalers and thus nullify the voting majority which Japan and its pro-whaling allies secured in the organisation for the first time last year, at the IWC meeting in St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies. The six who will line up against Japan in Anchorage, Alaska, are Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Croatia, Peru and Costa Rica.

Greece and Cyprus have come on board after a British lobbying campaign in which a glossy brochure, setting out the case against whaling and jointly signed by Tony Blair and the doyen of British environmentalists, Sir David Attenborough, was sent to 57 governments, including new European Union members.

Slovenia and Croatia joined up after earlier British encouragement, and the two Latin American countries will be voting because they have paid up the arrears in their IWC subscriptions (which last year prevented them) - Peru at the prompting of the British and Costa Rica after a campaign by US environmentalists...





Top U.S. Sushi Company Linked to Whaling
Stephen Leahy

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37307

BROOKLIN, Canada, Apr 11 (IPS) - An investigation has revealed that the U.S. supplier of sushi to more than 6,000 restaurants is associated with a Japanese company that sells millions of tins of whale meat.

Despite a global ban on killing whales, Japan's Kyokuyo, a multinational seafood conglomerate, sells between 10 and 20 million cans of whale meat a year, according to an Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report released Tuesday.

"Kyokuyo is breaking international laws," said Alan Thornton, president of EIA, an environmental group based in the United States and Britain.

"Since the 1930s, Kyokuyo has been profiting from the deaths of an estimated 130,000 great whales," Thornton told IPS...



Read more: http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2452383.ece