Tokyo

The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is usually a fractious affair. But the recriminations surrounding this year's event, held in the former Japanese whaling port of Shimonoseki last week, have left some observers fearing for the organization's future in the face of increasingly bitter stand-offs between pro- and anti-whaling lobbies.

In 1986, the IWC voted for a moratorium on commercial whaling to protect diminishing stocks. The commission's scientific committee has since devised a computer model to allow sustainable quotas to be set, but the majority of anti-whaling nations has upheld the ban.

Japan is lobbying to overturn the moratorium, citing survey results that show that some whales, such as the minke, are abundant enough to support an end to the ban. But Japan's research programme, which includes the killing of some 600 whales per year, has garnered criticism — not least because the meat often ends up being sold for human consumption in Japan.

Japan's plan to take a further 50 minkes and 50 sei whales was attacked this year in a report submitted to the IWC's scientific committee by a research team led by Phil Clapham of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The programme “provides no testable hypotheses and thus no reasonable criteria by which to judge its results”, the report claims.

As expected, Japan's attempt to overturn the moratorium was rejected. But the big surprise was the voting down of a US–Russian request for a five-year extension to an agreement that allows aboriginal communities in Alaska and Chukotka, northeast Russia, to take a yearly quota of 280 endangered bowhead whales.

Japanese delegates, who voted against the extension, said that they opposed it because of US “hypocrisy” in rejecting a proposal for Japan's traditional whaling communities to be allowed to take 50 minkes. The vote “showed the anti-whaling countries that they couldn't do whatever they want”, says Seiji Ohsumi, director of the Institute of Cetacean Research in Tokyo. But if such tit-for-tat actions continue, there is a danger that the IWC will fall apart, raising the spectre of unregulated commercial whaling.

The IWC's scientific committee seems to be just as divided as its parent body. “It just puts together contradictory reports from the scientists representing the two sides,” laments Toshio Kasuya, a whale-ecology researcher at Teikyo University of Science and Technology, west of Tokyo, who sits on the committee as an independent scientist.

Last week, Japan's fisheries agency said that its scientists will not take part in a meeting next month to analyse the techniques used in the country's research, citing scheduling difficulties. But some scientists claim that Japan is unwilling to have its research critically evaluated.