The 2009 meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Madeira, Portugal, has ended in deadlock.

No consensus could be reached on Japan's proposal that it be allowed to resume commercial whaling in its own coastal waters — banned since 1986 — in exchange for reducing its quota of whales killed for 'scientific research' in Antarctic waters.

Scott Baker, a researcher at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute in Newport, told the meeting that the number of coastal whales killed as 'by-catch' in fishing nets, and sold on Japanese markets, is under-reported. His team found that by-catch numbers approach 150 minke whales a year, roughly equivalent to those killed in Japan's North Pacific offshore whaling programme. A 2007 study (C. S. Baker et al. Mol. Ecol. 16, 2617–2626; 2007) found similar coastal by-catch depletion in South Korea.

The IWC also postponed a decision on Denmark's request for Greenland's indigenous Inuits to hunt 10 humpback whales a year.